Internationalization
David Cuny's suggestion about internationalization is a good one. However,
anyone who works on this project should make sure he or she knows something
about the languages and alphabets before the project is cast in concrete.
I was involved in just such a project in the early 1980s. It had an
egregious error in the formal specification, which would have made the
sponsor a laughing stock for anybody who knew anything about foreign
languages -- as well as the company I was working for, on contract.
The sponsor was an organization that was connecting the electronic catalogs
of a group of libraries. This required the terminals to be able to generate
and recognize a wide variety of alphabetic characters in many languages that
use alphabets, such as Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and many others. These
languages are now taken into account in latter-day ASCII; I'm not sure the
standards had been issued when my project was under way. They may have been
in preparation, or they may not have been started. In any case, how the
error I found got past the librarians working for the sponsor amazes me.
One of the "characters" specified for the terminal was a little circle well
above the base line on which all characters were displayed. In the
specifications, this little circle was called an "angstrom". I knew darn
well that wasn't the correct name for that little circle; I didn't know what
the correct name was, but I did know what an angstrom is. I went to a
public library and consulted an elementary Swedish grammar book to find out
what that little circle should be called.
I learned that the Swedish alphabet includes several vowels that the English
alphabet doesn't have. One of those vowels is an A with a little circle on
top of it, which is different from the A without the circle. The little
circle is not a separate character in Swedish. The word "angstrom", derived
from the name of a 19th-century Swedish physicist, is correctly spelled with
the A-with-circle.
So help me, I didn't know a thing about Swedish before consulting that
elementary grammar book, and to this day the only thing I remember about
Swedish is that it has those two characters, the "normal" A and the A with
the circle.
I told the people in the company where I was working about this error, but
they said nothing could be done about it, because it was in the specs. In
later years, I've come to think I should have written to the president of
the company to warn him of this ridiculous mistake.
Later, after I was no longer involved, I heard that the project had gone
down in flames, with a lot of ill will on both sides. I rather wonder if
the error I found had something to do with it. I also wonder how many
equally ridiculous errors were specified for characters in other alphabets.
Wally Riley
wryly at mindspring.com
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