July 26, 2007

scorpio's i18n changes

in case you were wondering, the main i18n changes for scorpio (coldfusion 8) really revolved around upgrading coldfsion's JDK to version 6. what did that buy us? well core Java's first set of locales based on CLDR data:
  • zh_SG - Chinese (Simplified), Singapore
  • en_MT - English, Malta
  • en_PH - English, Philippines
  • en_SG - English, Singapore
  • el_CY - Greek, Cyprus
  • id_ID - Indonesian, Indonesia
  • ga_IE - Irish, Ireland
  • ms_MY - Malay, Malaysia
  • mt_MT - Maltese, Malta
  • pt_BR - Portuguese, Brazil
  • pt_PT - Portuguese, Portugal
  • es_US - Spanish, United States
hopefully this trend will continue. beyond the new locale data it also provides support for the Japanese Imperial Calendar which we can tap into for date conversion and formatting simply by setting coldfusion's locale to the new JP variant:
<cfscript>
// set appropriate locale
setLocale("ja_JP_JP");
// Japanese Imperial Calendar date format writeoutput("#lsDateFormat(now(),"FULL")#");
</cfscript>
which should give you something like: 平成19年7月26日 how cool is that? for more details on the new i18n bits in JDK 6 see this.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 9:30 PM 0 comments

July 24, 2007

Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From the Grave

the wonderfully named "moronland" site has a page for the 13 worst translation mistakes. most of these should be familiar if you follow tex texin's (the unicode bulldog) Marketing Translation Mistakes.

the "moronland" page is kind of unique in that it coins the term Babelfished, as in I wonder if these companies just Babelfished the slogans into another language.

another set of examples why you should use human beings for translation ;-)

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posted by Paul Hastings @ 3:39 PM 0 comments