Adventures in Localization
Jack MiszencinSeptember 22, 2022
Overview
- A whole lot of Arabic
- Accommodating right-to-left
- “Telling a story” for users
- Dialects
- Peculiarities of the language
- Kurdish - What's the Standard?
- The Nepali Calendar
- Somaliland Locations - What’s in a place name?
- Miscellaneous
I. Arabic
- Our first foreign language for Primero.
- Right-to-left alignment.
- The wide variation between formal language and the tens of dialects spoken in different countries.
- Letters are connected, with multiple forms for each letter.
- Words tend to be shorter than in other languages, but letters are smaller.
- Optional use of short vowels makes search matches tricky
Arabic: Accommodating right-to-left languages
- Basic changes: “Please display text as right-aligned if in Arabic.”
- Page alignment: Users experience the page right-to-left.
- Icons, and internal alignment: Buttons and forms now have to be updated.
Overview: Adventures in Localization
This presentation will not cover everything there is to know about localization. I don’t have enough time or expertise for that. Things we won’t talk about:
- Localization of data (data sovereignty, etc.)
- Varying concepts of social welfare principles in different cultures.
- Accessibility (which we did implement in Primero).
- Time zones.
Instead of covering all aspects of localization, I will share what I hope are helpful anecdotes and lessons learned from the Primero project.
