internationalization

Internationalization (AKA internationalisation, i18n; localization, l10n.) is the process of adapting software/content to various languages.

What can we do, to make IndieWeb technologies more easily usable, by people who are not publishing in (US) English?

Background

• To encourage broader/better support of international content, modern internet and web standards strongly advocate the support of character sets such as UTF-8.
• The vocabularies used in such standards in general use US English terms and spelling (ref: W3C, IETF) for elements, attributes, properties and values. For example (X)HTML is defined in US English (e.g "color", "center"). See en-US FAQ for more on why this is actually good for internationalization.

Issues

• ...

Solutions

• Use the HTML lang and diretion (dir) attributes wisely.
• For telephone numbers in hCard, use abbr and the ITU E.123 standard international format, for example:

  <abbr class="tel" title="+44 1233 456 7890">01233 456 7890</abbr>

• Some web frameworks make i18n particularly easy, e.g. Django (which uses GNU gettext). This is important if you wish to provide a multilingual posting UI.
• When offering a multi lingual site, language indicators can be useful. One can use flags for this, but since flags more refer to countries, and countries can have multiple languages themselfs, it might be better to use shortcodes like 'NL' or 'FR' instead of 🇳🇱 or 🇫🇷.

Services

Wikidata

Javascript library exists to fetch all the translated labels from Wikidata for terms identified with URIs http://googleknowledge.github.io/qlabel/

Software

• WordPress
  • Basic Bilingual

See also

• http://microformats.org/wiki/en-us
• http://microformats.org/wiki/en-us-faq

this wiki in other languages

See:

• other languages
• how to start a new translation

Internationalization and localization references

• W3C Internationalization and Localization
• Wikipedia's definition of internationlization and localization
• The Localization Industry Standards Association - Some information requires site registration (like the primer), but not paid membership. Specific marketing details require paid membership.
• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox article: International Web Usability - which aligns with the microformats principle for humans first, machines second.

See Also

• language
• Example of several types of localization within the visual content of a movie https://youtube.com/shorts/epQVrt4gliI