{"id":1600,"date":"2007-10-24T16:31:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-24T20:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/24\/a-localization-horror-story\/"},"modified":"2018-02-06T15:42:33","modified_gmt":"2018-02-06T20:42:33","slug":"a-localization-horror-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/24\/a-localization-horror-story\/","title":{"rendered":"A Localization Horror Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

The documentation for Perl’s Maketext module<\/a> mentions an interesting issue:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\r\nFirst off, your code for “I scanned %g directory.” or “I scanned %g directories.” assumes there’s only singular or plural. But, to use linguistic jargon again, Arabic has grammatical number, like English (but unlike Chinese), but it’s a three-term category: singular, dual, and plural. In other words, the way you say “directory” depends on whether there’s one directory, or two<\/i> of them, or more than two<\/i> of them. Your test of ($directory == 1)<\/code> no longer does the job. And it means that where English’s grammatical category of number necessitates only the two permutations of the first sentence based on “directory [singular]” and “directories [plural],” Arabic has three—and, worse, in the second sentence (“Your query matched %g file in %g directory.”), where English has four, Arabic has nine. You sense an unwelcome, exponential trend taking shape.\r\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\r\n

I’ve run into simpler versions of this problem several times, in different programming languages, and never found a satisfying solution.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The documentation for Perl’s Maketext module mentions an interesting issue: First off, your code for “I scanned %g directory.” or “I scanned %g directories.” assumes there’s only singular or plural. But, to use linguistic jargon again, Arabic has grammatical number, like English (but unlike Chinese), but it’s a three-term category: singular, dual, and plural. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[309],"class_list":["post-1600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming-category","tag-localization"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1600"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20441,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600\/revisions\/20441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}