Growing Up with Globalization Andrew Turgeon - IBM - Pittsburgh, PA - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Growing Up with Globalization

Andrew Turgeon - IBM - Pittsburgh, PA apturgeo@us.ibm.com

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In the Beginning…

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New Customer!

Except they require the following:

• 8 languages other than English
• Culturally-accurate data formats
• Timezone support for 12 unique locations
• Bidirectional text capabilities

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Wish I would have prepared for that before I wrote all this code…

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Agenda

• Statistics Overview
• Globalization
• Getting Started
• Basic I18n - The Rails Way
• Variables & Pluralization
• Culture-Specific Data

Formats

• Bidirectional

Languages

• Testing
• Takeaways

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Statistics Overview

Languages of the Internet (2015)

English 26% Chinese 21% Spanish 8% Arabic 5% Portuguese 4% Japanese 3% Russian 3% Malay 3% French 3% German 3% Other 22%

74% of Internet traffic in 2015 was from users who prefer or only speak languages other than English

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http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm

520%

0% 1,750% 3,500% 5,250% 7,000% Japanese German English French Other Spanish Malay Portuguese Chinese Russian Arabic

Growth of Internet Users By Language (2000-2015)

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Statistics Overview

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm

Statistics Overview

Timezones of the Internet

*Currently 39 Unique Local Times in use

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http://royal.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/internet-users-time-zones-pingdom-5801.jpg

I get it. What do I need to do?

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Globalization

(in a nutshell)

Internationalization (i18n) Localization (l10n)

Our Job

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Step 1 Step 2

Watson Explorer

Lots of… English…

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Getting Started

• You can retrieve the locale from the user preferences (best)
• Or you can try getting it from the accept language header (ok)
• Using the pre-bundled I18n framework in Rails,

add the following to the controller:

*Make sure to use it in the html tag!

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Basic I18n - The Rails Way

Somewhere in a galaxy far far away…

../config/locales/en/activity_feed.yml

• DON’T REUSE same text
• Hierarchy with short keys

BAD

*Note: Use ellipsis character (…), not three dots (...)

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../app/widgets/activity_feed/display.html.erb

Variables & Pluralization

• Use interpolated variables for dynamic data
• More plural forms exist in other languages

Bad

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Culture-Specific Data Formats

• Define all your formats in key-value lookups, including defaults
• Follow similar structure for currency, numbers, and percentages

Bad

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*Required hierarchy for I18n.l usage

Timezones

• Always store in UTC (ISO6801)
• Always consume in currently configured timezone
• Make sensible defaults, but user setting is preferred

Bad

Example: Time visualizations in Javascript

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Bidirectional Languages

Not all languages read the same direction!

• Use Unicode
• For both right-to-left AND left-to-right text at the same time, use

embedded tags to indicate text direction

HTML5

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• Serve mirrored CSS for absolute/relative positioning

Testing

• Static code analysis with i18n-tasks gem
• Testing dynamic translations (with RSpec):
• Transitioning from non-i18n to i18n, create a “foo” or longer

word language pack for testing (easy to spot non-foo)

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Takeaways

• Treat language as an abstraction from the beginning (sooner the better)
• Don’t try to be a hero when doing i18n
• Getting started isn’t too bad when you use a framework that is:
• Maintainable
• Modifiable
• Testable
• Translatable
• addresses main pitfalls discussed in this presentation

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Q&A

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Andrew Turgeon - apturgeo@us.ibm.com

Thanks!

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