[openbeos] Re: Messages Translation ?

Looking to expand my knowledge here and play devils advocate!

Two good friends of mine, one from Kobe and another who just lived 
there for a while say Kanji is one of many written forms of the 
Japanese language, which raises the point, what about the others? 

My main worry here, is complete universal localisation actually 
possible? I'm not just talking the obvious romany (latin), cyrillic and 
Kanji, but what about arabic and hebrew too? I can't see how a 
'universal' interface can handle the myriad of script forms in the many 
diverse languages.... seriously, apps are surely hard enough to 
translate between European languages and these at least have the 
characters 'fairly' constant! eg Exit, Salida (?), Sortir (?) etc.... 
Maybe a plugin for each 'style' of script would be better?

I think maybe a Glass Elevator RFC, or at least a System Requirements 
Document should be drafted on this subject.

Regards,
Matt - feeling global

> > Although I would willingly lend my hand and scanner to creating a 
> > CJK
> > font, I unfortunately don't (yet) have the arcane knowledge for
> > creating a good looking, scalable, and small (relatively speaking)
> > font from those images.  I am familiar with nearly all of the 
> > korean
> > syllables.  I know more of the simplified chinese characters than 
> > the
> > traditional characters.  I have only recently begun my study of
> > japanese characters so my form is rather poor for them.  If someone
> > were interested in working with me I can scan high resolution 
> > images
> > and pass them on.  Then again, it'd probably be better to have a
> > native create the characters because I may miss some nuance and my
> > knowledge of the character set is admittedly incomplete.  It's
> > probably not the best use of my skills either, since I think
> > development is in more demand here.
> 
> From the way I understand it, with japanese, here's how it works:
> 
> There is a free fontset, and a free dictionary.
> 
> You type in the romanized japanese sounds (this should be *really* 
> easy to
> parse, given the way that japanese is romanized), and it converts it 
> to
> hiragana/katakana (alphabet).  Typing the spacebar cycles between 
> kanji
> options (since there isn't a "space" character in japanese).  If 
> there is
> nothing highlighted, then a space is inserted.  If there is something
> highlighted and the enter key is pressed, the highlighted characters
> become de-highlighted; otherwise, a hard return is inserted.
> 
> A rudimentary knowledge of japanese is really all that is necessary, 
> since
> you won't have to compile a dictionary of japanese words, or
> anything.  Actually, the dictionary that ships with BeOS is amazing; 
> it
> includes place-names for Okinawa, which really has its own language 
> and
> has sounds that aren't "japanese".
> 
> Isaac
> 
>

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