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Networking Babel

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To think and share information about social networking multilingually, e.g. issues of fonts and Internet encodings, cross-language metadata, translation & localisation

Members: 4
Latest Activity: Jan 14, 2010

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Software which works well multilingually

Following on from my publication (for the BarCamp Frica UK event in London on 7 November 2009) of a brief paper about fonts and software supporting multilingual publishing and information-sharing, I…Continue

Tags: software, multilingual

Started by Conrad Taylor Nov 18, 2009.

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Comment by Conrad Taylor on January 14, 2010 at 7:48: By and large, the applications and operating systems that people are using these days are not a big barrier to the use of international character sets, at least for languages based on Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. However, a big barrier is that people do not generally know how to enter those characters into documents or into Web forms. In fact in my experience most Windows users don’t know how to use Alt+ numeric keyboard codes to insert extended punctuation such as — « » let alone åøéü etc.

I am wondering, suppose you are a Polish worker from Łódź, and you want to drop into an Internet café in London to send an email home to Mum, how do you do it? Hack the keyboard settings, and try to remember what the Polish keyboard looks like?

Comment by David Wilcox on November 16, 2009 at 10:00: Hi Conrad - thanks for starting such a potentially interesting group. Have you seen this over on WiserEarth? They are looking for translation teams

Comment by Conrad Taylor on November 14, 2009 at 12:46: As an initial contribution, I would like to share a workshop paper that I prepared for BarCamp Africa UK (7 November 2009, London) on the topic of publishing technology solutions and fonts to support indigenous African languages. The paper can be downloaded as an 8-page PDF.