what is the deal with internationalisation?

Eli schütze ramírez

WEB ENGINEER

@elibelly

👋

  👶🏽    ❤️    🤓    📝    🏡

🇲🇽🇳🇮🇺🇸🇨🇳🇬🇧

united kingdom

nicaragua

InternationaliSation?

INTERNATIONALIZATION?

 

WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH

It's a piece of cake!*

*JK it's very complex

i18n? wtf?

🤔

Numeronym

A number-based word, for example:

  • Numbers as sounds: K9, l8r

  • numbers as meaning: 007, 24/7, 911

  • adding up the number of letters between the first and last and then using that number instead of the middle of the word, wow, what a good idea : i18n, l10n, a11y

  • ... n7m

i18n? wtf?

🤔

the internet ™

Icon made by Dot on Paper from www.flaticon.com 

Languages of Websites

internet users by language

🌍🌎🌏

internationaliSation

is part of accessibility

 

 

💡

InternationaliZation

If you internationalise, you design or develop your content, application, specification, and so on, in a way that ensures it will work well for, or can be easily adapted for, users from any culture, region, or language.

W3C Standards

You might do something like...

🇪🇸

🇬🇧

Your code
except with templates or placeholders

instead of strings

localised string "resources"

🇮🇹

Store some String Resources (e.g. JSON)

REFER TO THEM BY ID IN THE CODE

Handlebars :

React :

JavaScript :

think about...

  • Language

  • Writing System and line breaks - é, โลก, 世界

  • Formatting Date, Time, Currency - 08/01/19

  • Writing Direction - LTR, RTL, bidi

  • Ordering, Pluralisation - one, few, many

  • Grammar and sentence structure

  • Relative time - 'days ago'

  • *BONUS: COLOR THEORY, RESPONSIVE DESIGN

THANKS, unicode!

☕️

咖啡

قهوة

coffee

 

 develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globaliSation standards

THE UNICODE CONSORTIUM

  • Unicode Standard: One number for one character - UTF-8
  • CLDR and ICU Technical committees 
  • Bidirectional Text Algorithm

Unicode bidi algoritm

  • Each character is either strongly or weakly typed with a direction (LTR, RTL, neutral)
  • The characters are displayed with reference to the document's or parent's base direction

💡TIP: If you are using bidirectional text make sure your html tags have a 'dir' attribute

<p dir="ltr">bahrain مصر kuwait</p>
<p dir="rtl">bahrain مصر kuwait</p>

👉

👈

BCP 47

Internet Engineering Task Force

best common practice

Tags for Identifying Locales

[Language Tag]-[Subtags]*
en-US, en-GB
mn-Cyrl-MN
zh-Hant-HK
es-419

  👶🏽    ❤️    🤓     📝   🏡

🇲🇽🇳🇮🇺🇸🇨🇳🇬🇧

es_MX      es_NI     en_US  zh_Hans_CN    en_GB

es_419

My Locales

what will you show me?

Always let the user choose THEIR OWN LOCALE

💡

CLDR - COMMON LOCALE DATA REPOSITORY

The most extensive standard repository of locale-specific data

Maintained by Unicode Consortium

Most devs will never see it - usually wrapped in libraries

It's originally in XML 

 

Locale-specific

Formatting

and parsing

Translations of names of things

Language and scripts

Country

info

Dates

Times

Timezones

Numbers

Currency

Languages

Countries/Cities

Timezones

Months/Weekdays

Currency

Characters Used

Writing Direction

Capitalization

Plural Cases

Sorting rules

Language Usage

Currency

Telephone Codes

Calendar conventions

@elibelly

<days>
  <dayContext type="format">
	<dayWidth type="abbreviated">
		<day type="sun">dom.</day>
		<day type="mon">lun.</day>
		<day type="tue">mar.</day>
		<day type="wed">mié.</day>
		<day type="thu">jue.</day>
		<day type="fri">vie.</day>
		<day type="sat">sáb.</day>
	</dayWidth>
	<dayWidth type="short">
		<day type="sun">DO</day>
		<day type="mon">LU</day>
		<day type="tue">MA</day>
		<day type="wed">MI</day>
		<day type="thu">JU</day>
		<day type="fri">VI</day>
		<day type="sat">SA</day>
	</dayWidth>
	<dayWidth type="wide">
        	<day type="sun">domingo</day>
		<day type="mon">lunes</day>
		<day type="tue">martes</day>
		<day type="wed">miércoles</day>
		<day type="thu">jueves</day>
		<day type="fri">viernes</day>
		<day type="sat">sábado</day>
	</dayWidth>
  </dayContext>
</days>

CLDR 'Days' Section - Spanish Language (en-EN)

ICU

international components for unicode

defines message format for resource strings 

set of C/C++ and Java libraries
wraps cldr

 

  • Welcome, { name } !
     
  • There were { count, number } people there        // 1,000 vs 1.000
     
  • My birthday is { birthday, date , short }      //   04/02/2017 vs 02/04/2017
     
  • { gender, select ,
        male { He likes trains },
        female { She likes trains },
        other { They like trains }
    }
     
  • { count , plural ,
      =0 {No more seats available }
      one {Just a single seat left!}|
      other { # seats left}
    }   // some languages have few and many !

How to write for i18n

Write full sentences when possible

Use complex arguments (ie. select, plural) as the outermost structure of a message

Do not try to build sentences yourself 🙅🏼‍♀️

{ gender, select,
    male {He likes to dance the cha cha in the moonlight},
    female {She likes to dance the cha cha in the moonlight},
    other {They like to dance the cha cha in the moonlight}
}
{ gender, select,
    male {He},
    female {She},
    other {They}
  likes to dance the cha cha in the moonlight

}

{ gender, select,
    male {He likes},
    female {She likes},
    other {They like}
 to dance the cha cha in the moonlight

}

✅

❌

❌

🚨 Javascript Alert 🚨

ECMAScript INTL API

ECMA 402

  • Intl.NumberFormat
  • Intl.DateTimeFormat
  • Intl.Collator
  • Not supported in older browsers 
  • Expensive (esp. in frameworks like React)

*Internationalisation in js

is still a work in progress

 

 

For more information, look up the TC39 ECMA 402 Proposal
or the W3C TPAC Internationalization Working Group

FORMAT JS - CORE

  • Exports Javascript API with more functionality than ECMA
  • Polyfills where needed 

REACT INTL

https://github.com/yahoo/react-intl

i18N has a logistics problem

Continuous Localisation ♻️

It is a way of automatically, seamlessly gathering new source material, publishing it for translation, acquiring translations and integrating them back into the product.

I18n is much easier to integrate into your project early

💡

Swiss Franc in English (en-GB)

Swiss Franc in German (de-DE)

height: 8.57rem
height: 8.57rem 🎉

Swedish krona in French (fr-FR)

British Pound Sterling in English (en-GB)

grid design 🎉

you *can* style for specific languages

note: always make sure to check browser compatibility when using intl tools and tread carefully

css lang pseudo selector

:lang( <language-code> ) {}

Img source: https://css-tricks.com/almanac/selectors/l/lang/

A note on line breaks

  • Not all languages delimit words 
  • Not all languages have obvious places to break a line 
  • It's not always easy for a machine to ​programmatically determine what a word or syllable is like a human can 

https://www.w3.org/International/articles/typography/linebreak

?

0.5 / 5 stars

💡

  • i18n is part of accessibility - Internationalise all the things!
  • i18n is supported by a bunch of standards, helps do it "right"
  • Try to start early if you can
  • Always let your user pick their own locale
  • German is a great first test language!

🙏 Thank you 🙏

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