I am working on an iOS app that is multi language (English & Arabic). Given that the Middle East app markets cannot be localized with additional languages other than English, I have to include Arabic description and keywords.
The meta keywords (100 char.) are tricky as I need to include both English (which is written left to right) and Arabic (which is written right to left).
My questions are follows:
What do I used to separate the English and Arabic keywords? Do I used the English comma separator (,) or the Arabic comma separator (،).
Is the following example the correct way of doing it (food,guide,طعام,دليل)?
Thanks you.
I'm currently translating a website from english into other languages but have a problem when it comes to technical terms (non words) like "crontab".
Should I keep the english translation or is there another way to find the equivalent?
These aren't actually english words and when it comes to languages like Japanese, I'm at a loss as to what to do.
Here's an example sentence as an example:
"Use crontab to schedule scripts."
which translated into Japanese via Google Translate becomes:
"スクリプトをスケジュールするcrontabを使用してください。"
You can see how bizarre this looks, and I'm wondering if the sentence could even be understood by a Japanese speaker.
What do I do in these situations?
Using English words in Japanese
Talking about the word crontab, I think it's not bizarre to write it in English in a Japanese sentence like this:
crotabを使用してください
(please use crontab)
On Japanese wikipedia, you can see how crontab is used without translating into Japanese.
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crontab
In Japanese technical writing, especially when you mention name of tools, it is common to use English as it is without translating into Japanese.
Using Katakana
You could also write the sentence like below using Katakana.
クーロンタブを使用してください
(please use crontab).
Japanese usually writes words from English in Katakana. Japanese Katakana is phonetic, in other words each character represents a sound (not meaning). But In this case, it doesn't look natural.
Mistranslation
There is a mistranslation in your Japanese sentence.
スクリプトをスケジュールするcrontabを使用してください。
(Please use crontab which scedule a script.)
To correct this, you could go like this:
スクリプトをスケジュールするには、crontabを使用してください。
(In order to schedule a script, please use crontab.)
Hope this helps.
I wonder something. We have an rails app that had been translated in 30/40 languages including exotic languages. We wonder what's the best way to handle numbers and number translation.
For example, we have in english, a string 3 items, but in persian or arabic, it will become something like ٣ سلع. Unfortunately, I am getting 3 سلع using I18n gem.
I am using this file as locale:
https://raw.github.com/svenfuchs/rails-i18n/master/rails/locale/ar.yml
The locale is correclty set to ar it just output 3 in place of ٣ (the arabic/persian character)
Any ideas?
This seems like a stupid question. Is the number "10" refered to "10" in Hebrew, Arabic, and all languages? I'm not seeing anywhere where it says you need to do anything special with numbers when dealing with localization. Maybe number format but what about the number itself? I would think that numbers would read differently in right-to-left languages but translate.google.com is giving me the same number back. Can anyone confirm this?
Arabic and Japanese (?) do have different glyphs for numbers, but the standard system is so commonplace, that usually numbers are not converted.
If you're using the .NET formatting functions, then the numbers will be formatted according to the system preferences (I'm talking commas and decimal points here)
Different languages can use different digit sigils;
Number representation is different. eg 1,234.56 in English is represented as 1.234'56 in German.
So the answer is yes.
The digits 0-9 usually don't require any localization, except minor tweaks like AndreyT said, but those are more "fonts" related than anything.
The only important thing to take into account is large number representation.
For example, take 1mio$
In Switzerland, it will be:
$1'000'000.-
in US
$1,000,000
In Japan it will be
$100万
I don't know other place, but you got the idea.
For Japan, it's very uncommon to see numbers greater than 10'000 without using a kanji.
But I think you should see with the person doing the localization.
For the actual numbers themselves (and not floating poing, thousands seperator, etc) there are in fact differences between languages.
Hebrew numerals actually use the Hebrew letters as a number system, though it is used only for "traditional" numbers, such as the year in the Jewish calendar, the chapter, verse and page numbers in the Hebrew Bible, in lists (similar to using roman numerals instead of numbers), etc. But for all other cases, Hindu-Arabic numerals are used (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4...) and are written left-to-right, even while the rest of the Hebrew text is written right-to-left (i.e. NML KJIHG 123 FEDC BA).
In Arabic, most countries use the Arabic-Indic numerals, but the Hindu-Arabic numerals are also understood.
In any case, .NET localization should take care of all conversions and display issues, and there's nothing special you need to do unless you render your own GUI.
There quite a few tings that can be localized in numbers. For example, in USA the fractional part of a number (if it has a fractional part) is separated by a dot, while in Russia a comma is normally used. In USA commas would be used to separate three-digit groups in the number, while in Russia it is not customary to separate them at all, or space is used for that purpose (or maybe some other character, but not a comma). And so on (although most of the formatting options apply to monetary quantities).
Even the preferred way to write characters themselves can depend on locale. In USA the character for '7' is usually written in two strokes, while in Europe it quite often has a third stroke - a short horizontal line through the middle. This, of course, is less important, since the two-stroke version is still recognized everywhere.
If you are displaying the numbers for math purposes (for example, showing 5 + 3 = 8), then use the standard digits 0-9. These are used nearly universally in mathematics.
If you are displaying something that is highly localized
(i.e. pricing on a street vendor's point-of-sale system in Saudi Arabia), there are a handful of countries that use different digits that are localized to their respective languages.
Most regions of people in the world will be fine with understanding 0-9 though.
I found this website to be a good starting guide: https://phrase.com/blog/posts/number-localization/
Some examples:
Bengali, for example, uses the Bengali–Assamese numeral system, whose
digits differ from the Western Arabic system: ০, ১, ২, ৩, ৪, ৫, ৬, ৭,
৮, ৯.
In some locales like Saudi Arabia, for example, it’s common to
represent numbers in the local numeral system, Eastern Arabic, and not
the Western Arabic system.
Keep in mind that we are just talking about digits here. When it comes to fractions (/), decimals (.), percentages (%), large number separators (,), number symbols (#), etc. most regions have specific rules and that's a whole other topic. They are not universal.
Could you suggest me a code or a library (possibly java) to convert digits (e.g. 24) in letters (e.g. twenty-four)? Obviously I need to change locale (from English to Italian).
Check this link: http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/3685
You'll have to translate the numbers into italian, but apart from that it should solve your problem.
/Klaus