Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with i18n

Unicode replacement characters

srboisvert — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 05:52:15 -0800

Is there a name for the domino like box characters with 4 characters inside that display when you don't have support for a language script? There a few examples on this page that show up for me. Bengal, Bhutan and Khmer for example show up as boxes with 4 characters inside. The first two characters are often in common for all the boxes within each language example.
In case it is system dependent - Windows XP, Firefox 3.0.1, English(US).

CC outside the US?

breaks the guidelines? — Mon, 19 May 2008 14:05:58 -0800

Is the term “caption” or “closed caption” and the “CC in a TV” symbol commonly recognizable to non-U.S. people? Working on producing some Flash video content with English audio for which subtitles will be available in multiple languages, including European, South American, and Asian languages. Would non-English-speaking people know that the “CC” symbol in a user interface control indicates the option for subtitling?

Wikipedia says that most of the world make no distinction between “subtitles” and “captions.” Is there a standard terminology and semiology to indicate this feature as universally as possible?

How do you deal with Chinese characters that can't be represented in 16 bits?

bonecrusher — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 08:48:52 -0800

How are people dealing with >16 bit Unicode code points? Specifically, in languages like Java, C# and C++, which assume 16 bit characters (I believe), how are you supporting GB 18030? I would suspect that the various languages' methods like substring(), charAt(), operator[], etc can't be safely used in China. If your wstring, say, contains a Chinese string, then .size() doesn't tell you how many characters are in it, right? On a related note, what interesting Chinese characters require more than >16 bits? I'm thinking about making a short presentation for my co-workers on this subject and I'd like to have some interesting examples. (Oh, and I'm going to run any examples by my Chinese colleagues first, so don't bother trying to make me say "penis" or something in front of my co-workers :-))

Will an ipod display international characters?

the cydonian — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 01:35:49 -0800

How does the new gen ipod handle international characters in ID3 tags of an mp3 file? So I'm thiiis close to getting myself a 30 gig video ipod, and was wondering it'll scale to internationalized characters. My mp3 collection (all legit) is mostly world music, and I have, on prior occassions, painstakingly ensured that all non-English songs have their ID3 tags in their native languages. Which means, my iTunes collection has song titles and artists information in, among other scripts, Chinese, French, Thai, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and Punjabi.

I asked the sales guy at the local Apple showroom about this, but I don't think he understood the question; he was polite about it, but he appeared incredulous as to why anyone would presume non-English songs wont play on an ipod.

I googled, of course, but I don't seem to be hitting the right keywords, which is why I'm asking here.

(If it's any help, I know that itunes for Windows supports unicode; heck, that's where I editted most of my entries.)

How to link to an image with a Kanji filename?

fleacircus — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 12:08:10 -0800

I18n and HTML: How do display images that have kanji filenames, in both IE (PC) and Safari (Mac). So there I was minding my own business writing code that lets users export HTML reports, very image-heavy reports, that link to these images like so:

<img src="foo001.html"/><img src="foo002.html"/><img src="foo003.html"/> ...

Where the user decides the value of 'foo'. But then to my shock and disgust I find that Safari and IE can't seem to agree about what to do if "foo.html" is &#x30D5.html?

The W3C comment about non-ASCII characters in URIs is a bit discouraging. Safari seems to obey the recommendation without having the common courtesy to do the expected natural thing, while IE doesn't have any truck with the workaround.

I'll resort to JavaScript if I have to, but I was wondering if anyone knows of the happy medium, a format acceptable to both IE and Safari.