Some Geek Stuff

Wednesday, June 4th, 2003 | Geek Stuff

Pace   سلام   שלום   Hasîtî   शान्ति   Barış   和平   Мир

One of the things I do for a living is to make Final Cut Pro/Express work in multiple languages. This involves both the engineering work required to translate the User Interface of the Application into languages such as German, Japanese, and French as well as the work required to let people use the application in their native language regardless of the language of the application. For example, even if the application is running with an English user interface, a user who speaks Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, or Korean should be able to use Final Cut and enter text in their native language for movie titles, file names, or whereever.

To make this happen I implemented support for Unicode Text in the application. I won’t go into details of what unicode is or how it works – if you want to know more check out this page. But as part of this I’ve been trying to get my blog supporting international text too and I’ve FINALLY got it working…

The entry below is a cool page I found here that demonstrats functional unicode text… If your browser is showing garbage below then it isn’t unicode savvy.. I’d be curious to know who is seeing garbage and who is seeing what looks like arrabic or hebrew text…

Nuff geek stuff… for now… ;)…

Pace   سلام   שלום   Hasîtî   शान्ति   Barış   和平   Мир

English:
Say Peace in all languages! The people of the world prefer peace to war and they deserve to have it. Bombs are not needed to solve international problems when they can be solved just as well with respect and communication. The Internet Internationalization (I18N) community, which values diversity and human life everywhere, offers “Peace” in many languages as a small step in this direction.

Arabic:
أنطقوا سلام بكل اللغات! كل شععوب العالم تفصل السلام علي الحرب وكلها تستحق أن تنعم بع. إن القنابل لا تحل مشاكل العالم ويتم تحقيق ذلك فقط بالاحترام والتواصل. مجموعة تدويل الإنترنت (I18N) ØŒ والتي تأخذ بعين التقدير الاختلافات الثقافية والعادات الحياتية بين الشعوب، فإنها تقدم “السلام” بلغات كثيرة، كخطوة متواضعة في هذا الاتجاه.

Hebrew:
אמרו “שלום” בכל השפות! אנשי העולם מעדיפים את השלום על-פני המלחמה והם ראויים לו. אין צורך בפצצות כדי לפתור בעיות בין-לאומיות, רק בכבוד ובהידברות. קהילת בינאום האינטרנט (I18N), אשר מוקירה רב-גוניות וחיי אדם בכל מקום, מושיטה יד ל”שלום” בשפות רבות כצעד קטן בכיוון ×–×”.

1 Comment to Some Geek Stuff

Stairs
June 4, 2003

Hey kiddo, an interesting post indeed; I implemented unicode so that I could display Russian text in my journal, and, as here, it is flawless on all the important browsers (Safari, Omniweb, Opera), but as usual, open up in versions of IE and Netscape and it all goes to shit. I’ve even had a go on a Windows PC, and only a couple of versions do it properly. You’d think that more people would demand so significant a feature as standard. Windows puppets.

Never realised that Мир meant ‘peace’ – explains something about the space-station, but it’s kind of an irony given its fate.