Reboot - Language and Happiness
Two more short recaps of Reboot presentations.
Stephanie Booth - While we wait for the Babelfish
Another presentation for which I lost my (quite extensive) notes. Stephanie laid a finger on a sore point in online interaction. The fact that the internet is a place of linguistic islands where some multilingual travellers strike bridges across the chasm.
The problem is both on a strategic and a technical level, the first of which is already so difficult that it has precluded much work on the technical level thusfar. It is quite hard to agree upon how to let people indicate which languages they are comfortable with to what level and how to display content from multiple languages on a site.
If we figure the strategic part out, the technical implementation should come a lot easier. An interesting talk especially for those of us who are multilingual.
You should check out the talk page or her site where she has written up a lot of the talks of Reboot.
Alexander Kjerulf - Happiness
Image courtesy of Stephanie Booth.
I love Alexander’s approach to life, work and pretty much anything. I think I have not met anybody more positive than him yet. His talks usually are of a highly motivational nature, insightful and entertaining.
Next year I might skip on this though because knowing you will like a talk becomes too predictable. Being a reader of his blog and also being familiar with some TED talks on the subject of happiness and psychology, some of the material sounded a bit familiar to me, but the delivery by Alexander made up for that.
In his truly Epicurean philosophical view, Alexander lays out the meaning of life (happiness) and how best to achieve it along with practical tips and common misconceptions. It turns out that being happy is not a difficult thing at all.
All you need is:
1. Friends, family, love
2. Meaningful, fun work
3. Living a good life
He takes an uncompromising stance for happiness and against what he sees to be negative things, which is very refreshing. The two biggest threats to happiness are television and consumerism. If you see yourself indulging in any such behaviour stop it right now and read the writeup Stephanie made of this talk.
rzwitserloot http://reinier.zwitserloot.com/
June 10th, 2007English is still more or less the lingua franca of the web. Of sites that mostly do not run in english, a significant number of them are sufficiently localized that there’s not much point trying to translate; if you don’t speak the language the content isn’t all that useful either.
I don’t actually think that’s a bad thing. Translating user generated content is something that works more or less acceptable in those places where this is useful (highlight of the web in this regard: Wikipedia) - and is always based on (voluntary) translators.
Turning the machinery of the web into a multilingual system is fraught with problems. For example, if DNS domain names allowed all characters, you can create spoof sites that look exactly the same by using characters in the unicode range with a different id number but that look the same (or at least look very similar in the fonts used by webbrowsers to render the address bar and related security messages).
Not to mention that programming for I18N is a giant pain in the tusch. I’m probably being closed minded, but my general opinion on those who don’t speak rudimentary english to follow web sites: Screw them.
alper http://www.alper.nl
June 10th, 2007I’ll hear back from you when the general opinion of the Chinese is to screw you and all others who don’t speak rudimentary Mandarin.
Internationalized domain names do exist. Disallowing them would be a ridiculous bigotry. Yes there are spoofing problems and yes they should be solved.
It is difficult but also a very real problem. The guys from YelloYello were faced with this very same problem. Here they have a European audience with a wide diversity of language skills, content in different language about locations in different countries. What do you show to whom and how?
Cristiano Betta http://ibbydibby.com/
June 10th, 2007I must agree that I would like to see more sites translated. Especially because I think that the normal people like my mom are now missing out on most of the cool web2.0 stuff thatonly works in English. The last site I had this trouble with was Growsonyou.com which is really interesting for my mom!
Reinier http://zwitserloot.com
June 11th, 2007Really cool chinese sites?
I doubt it. Chinese CULTURE is virtually incapable of being creative (note, I’m not discriminating against chinese, just making a comment on the effects on culture caused by a repressive regime in power for many decades). I expect localized versions of popular webservices (twitter in chinese, anyone? Or how about in dutch?), sure, but, again, these are by their very nature localized. I’d prefer it if somehow I could search through it but it’s unlikely to be all that interesting given that I don’t live in China.
Internationalized Domain Names are a dumb implementation with fundamental security issues. This is unfortunate, because it means any effort to fix it is hampered by an old crappy standard getting in the way. I wouldn’t bet any money on that horse.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do - speak English. Or Engrish, or some even less recognizable patois. Don’t worry too much about culture. It’s very adaptable. China, Arabia, Japan, and other non-alphabet using sites will find a way around it. German-speaking languages already have, simply by replacing all impossible characters with the phonetic version of same. ß becomes ss, ö becomes oe, etcetera. It works - way better than IDNs are working.
Aesthetically somewhat questionable? Well, yes, but a huge security leak is also aesthetically somewhat questionable - it would suck for IDNs to get a sour ‘only used by criminals to fleece you’ vibe.
It’s a question of some very difficult adaptation by developers compared to some usually very simple adaptation by the userbase, who, by the way, are mostly already used to ‘translating’ their own character set into an alphabetic representation.
Backtracking for a moment to translations: Well, yes. But I don’t see the problem here. Proper, adult tools like java and GWT ship with UTF-8 and I18N completely ready to go. The fact that some toys like PHP and Python continue to think it’s appropriate to ever store strings in plain ASCII seems to have led to the idea that I18N is somehow an unsolved or at least very ‘difficult’ problem amongst the web2 crowd.
There is no problem. Either a site internationalizes itself, or some enterprising soul does it for you. Very elegant. Very web2.0.
NB: I half expected the german characters in this post to bollocks up, but apparently the wordpress guys have somehow managed to sidestep the minefield that is Unicode support in PHP. Kudos, I guess, for making crappy technology work anyway.