SanaPhil offers a range of global information management solutions including outsourced localization, translation management tools, software localization and much more...

Internationalization Character Sets

Asian languages do not exclusively use alphabetical systems; they also use pictorial representations of words called glyphs or ideographs. Problems can arise because many programs were written to support characters in a single byte, while Asian characters may require two or more bytes per charact- er. For this reason, products that need to be translated into Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, need to be double-byte enabled or written in Unicode. SanaPhil has an expert team who can evaluate and make changes to your code to support these languages.

In addition to providing formatting services for traditional publishing and repro, SanaPhil has the skills and experience to localize content designed for single source multi-channel publishing, whether created through “structured” versions of mainstream applications or specialized authoring environ- ments for SGML/HTML/XML with PDF deliverables.

SanaPhil's internationalization team allows you to focus on developing your product, while we prepare it for international markets.

SanaPhil's Internationalization Services are customized to meet your needs. Whether you require an internationalization analysis or need us to completely internationalize your product, SanaPhil has the skills and resources in-house.

Here are some of the issues we look for when evaluating and internationalizing your product.

Cultural and Technical Issues

When creating software and websites for use around the world, there are many considerations and modifications to be made.

Locales

The program may need to be modified to recognize which country's local conventions should be used.

Time and Date Displays: International time and dates are displayed differently around the world. In general, Americans indicate dates by 'month-day-year;' Europeans use 'day-month-year,' and Asian cultures use 'year-month-day.' The program needs to be designed to accommodate these variations.

Measurement Systems

The program should be written to accommodate both imperial and metric systems.

Formatting Numbers and Currency

Many languages use commas instead of decimals points and a period or a space instead of a comma to indicate the thousands place. Symbols for currency differ between countries as well. The software needs to be designed with these modifications in mind.

These are just a sampling of some of the considerations that must be made when programming for an international audience. Other things, such as bi-directional text, the use of icons, colors etc., need to be evaluated as well. SanaPhil's Internationalization team can help you evaluate and make recommenda- tions concerning these issues.

Sorting and Searching

Sorting in English is not a problem because sorting mechanisms are written with the assumption that the alphabet and words within the sentence are divided by spaces. Text in Far Eastern languages is represen- ted by symbols and characters. Because of this, sorting characters is more difficult than sorting words. There are also different sort sequences on a country by country basis. For example, European languages raise issues when accented characters are used. Searching can also cause problems. SanaPhil Interna- tional is very familiar with these issues and is able to make modifications to solve them.

Many localization projects handled by SanaPhil contain documentation components, in either electronic or paper-based format. We support all the software tools required to produce the various forms of docu- mentation on Windows, Mac or Unix platforms, and all major language groups including Western European, Nordic, Baltic, Central and Eastern European, Asian (Double Byte) and Middle Eastern (Bidirectional).

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