On Friday, March 28, 2003, at 10:49 am, Rich Morin wrote:
Character set difficulties are still a real problem, but so is dynamic text......fairly complicated tools for generating dynamically- pluralized English. Now generalize that tool set for multiple languages and/or more complex variations.
I take your point that making multilingual software is difficult , however to show what I mean about being conditioned liguistically in approaching a problem (by no means intended as a flame), some languages don't have plurals, or rather the grammar doesn't consider plurals to be as important as it is to English (and some other European languages), but is understood from the context (as in 1 sheep, 2 sheep...).
I'd just be happy if software producers followed Apple's system of including multiple language resources - living and working in Japan means I have a lot of drivers and applications for OSX in Japanese or English but not both, a state of afairs which makes trouble shooting, and generally using a tad complicated for me and my co-workers. So in practice nothing has really changed from OS9, even though OSX is designed to work differently. Laziness? possibly. Force of habit? assuredly - support for Apple products is apparently an after thought in the MS coloured world of Japan. The main reason however can be seen through Adobe products sold in Japan for OSX which are monolingual, the Japanese language version being approx 20% more expensive than the English version. The same for imported CDs and those released under licence in Japan - the cost of translation being added to the shelf price of the product (every CD has a nice booklet of lyrics translated into Japanese so you know what your singing when you go do some karaoke).
In my current work, I am generating user-specific explanations for the permission and ownership information in..........As I was writing generation code for the text above, ....... I quickly decided, however, that this was unlikely to be my problem.
I'm currently working on scheduling software (in perl, just to veer back onto topic), the users of which will mostly be native Japanese speakers. My point being need creates necessity - you don't need to support a second language and so don't see the necessity of including it ^_^ (<- Japanese emoticon)
Robin
