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Lessons From Linguistics: i18n Best Practices for Front-End Developers

shopify.engineering

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Re: Lessons From Linguistics: i18n Best Practices for Front-End Developers

#101
post #34

Not covered here: fonts and glyph appearances, which will nearly always end up displaying wrong in certain Asian languages -- https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/

Thank you for this. I tested it immediately on my site. Now, during testing I looked at the debug output before I browsed to a page, and the debug output was displaying the wrong characters, hanzi instead of kanji. But, when I browsed to the actual page, the characters were right, presumably because I'm setting the lang attribute in the HTML tag. Thank god I did that.

Still, testing this uncovered a bug in my Traditional Chinese code, so there's that to fix now :)

Re: Lessons From Linguistics: i18n Best Practices for Front-End Developers

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most common languages you can either choose between a combo adjective like Alice es activo(a) Or alice es activ@ But honestly as engineers, we should follow the advice of making the stilted constructions. We're already trained as users to expect that anyways from all the other apps. If it's just a monolingual app. Sure go nuts, make it read super fluidly. If you have to localize, just do it the tried and true…

Also, in Chinese, the logogram might change depending on the gender: 他/她, he/she, also part of his/her

To make things even worse. There is 祂 specifically for god-like characters (for example jesus). And 牠 for animals.
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