Locale::Maketext::TPJ13
Locale::Maketext::TPJ13Perl Programmers Reference GuLocale::Maketext::TPJ13(3)
NAME
Locale::Maketext::TPJ13 -- article about software localization
SYNOPSIS
# This an article, not a module.
DESCRIPTION
The following article by Sean M. Burke and Jordan Lachler first
appeared in The Perl Journal #13 and is copyright 1999 The Perl Jour-
nal. It appears courtesy of Jon Orwant and The Perl Journal. This doc-
ument may be distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.
Localization and Perl: gettext breaks, Maketext fixes
by Sean M. Burke and Jordan Lachler
This article points out cases where gettext (a common system for local-
izing software interfaces -- i.e., making them work in the user's lan-
guage of choice) fails because of basic differences between human lan-
guages. This article then describes Maketext, a new system capable of
correctly treating these differences.
A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen To You
"There are a number of languages spoken by human beings in this
world."
-- Harald Tveit Alvestrand, in RFC 1766, "Tags for the Identifica-
tion of Languages"
Imagine that your task for the day is to localize a piece of software
-- and luckily for you, the only output the program emits is two mes-
sages, like this:
I scanned 12 directories.
Your query matched 10 files in 4 directories.
So how hard could that be? You look at the code that produces the
first item, and it reads:
printf("I scanned %g directories.",
$directory_count);
You think about that, and realize that it doesn't even work right for
English, as it can produce this output:
I scanned 1 directories.
So you rewrite it to read:
printf("I scanned %g %s.",
$directory_count,
$directory_count == 1 ?
"directory" : "directories",
);
...which does the Right Thing. (In case you don't recall, "%g" is for
locale-specific number interpolation, and "%s" is for string interpola-
tion.)
But you still have to localize it for all the languages you're produc-
ing this software for, so you pull Locale::gettext off of CPAN so you
can access the "gettext" C functions you've heard are standard for
localization tasks.
And you write:
printf(gettext("I scanned %g %s."),
$dir_scan_count,
$dir_scan_count == 1 ?
gettext("directory") : gettext("directories"),
);
But you then read in the gettext manual (Drepper, Miller, and Pinard
1995) that this is not a good idea, since how a single word like
"directory" or "directories" is translated may depend on context -- and
this is true, since in a case language like German or Russian, you'd
may need these words with a different case ending in the first instance
(where the word is the object of a verb) than in the second instance,
which you haven't even gotten to yet (where the word is the object of a
preposition, "in %g directories") -- assuming these keep the same syn-
tax when translated into those languages.
So, on the advice of the gettext manual, you rewrite:
printf( $dir_scan_count == 1 ?
gettext("I scanned %g directory.") :
gettext("I scanned %g directories."),
$dir_scan_count );
So, you email your various translators (the boss decides that the lan-
guages du jour are Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Italian, so you have
one translator for each), asking for translations for "I scanned %g
directory." and "I scanned %g directories.". When they reply, you'll
put that in the lexicons for gettext to use when it localizes your
software, so that when the user is running under the "zh" (Chinese)
locale, gettext("I scanned %g directory.") will return the appropriate
Chinese text, with a "%g" in there where printf can then interpolate
$dir_scan.
Your Chinese translator emails right back -- he says both of these
phrases translate to the same thing in Chinese, because, in linguistic
jargon, Chinese "doesn't have number as a grammatical category" --
whereas English does. That is, English has grammatical rules that
refer to "number", i.e., whether something is grammatically singular or
plural; and one of these rules is the one that forces nouns to take a
plural suffix (generally "s") when in a plural context, as they are
when they follow a number other than "one" (including, oddly enough,
"zero"). Chinese has no such rules, and so has just the one phrase
where English has two. But, no problem, you can have this one Chinese
phrase appear as the translation for the two English phrases in the
"zh" gettext lexicon for your program.
Emboldened by this, you dive into the second phrase that your software
needs to output: "Your query matched 10 files in 4 directories.". You
notice that if you want to treat phrases as indivisible, as the gettext
manual wisely advises, you need four cases now, instead of two, to
cover the permutations of singular and plural on the two items,
$dir_count and $file_count. So you try this:
printf( $file_count == 1 ?
( $directory_count == 1 ?
gettext("Your query matched %g file in %g directory.") :
gettext("Your query matched %g file in %g directories.") ) :
( $directory_count == 1 ?
gettext("Your query matched %g files in %g directory.") :
gettext("Your query matched %g files in %g directories.") ),
$file_count, $directory_count,
);
(The case of "1 file in 2 [or more] directories" could, I suppose,
occur in the case of symlinking or something of the sort.)
It occurs to you that this is not the prettiest code you've ever writ-
ten, but this seems the way to go. You mail off to the translators
asking for translations for these four cases. The Chinese guy replies
with the one phrase that these all translate to in Chinese, and that
phrase has two "%g"s in it, as it should -- but there's a problem. He
translates it word-for-word back: "In %g directories contains %g files
match your query." The %g slots are in an order reverse to what they
are in English. You wonder how you'll get gettext to handle that.
But you put it aside for the moment, and optimistically hope that the
other translators won't have this problem, and that their languages
will be better behaved -- i.e., that they will be just like English.
But the Arabic translator is the next to write back. First off, your
code for "I scanned %g directory." or "I scanned %g directories."
assumes there's only singular or plural. But, to use linguistic jargon
again, Arabic has grammatical number, like English (but unlike Chi-
nese), but it's a three-term category: singular, dual, and plural. In
other words, the way you say "directory" depends on whether there's one
directory, or two of them, or more than two of them. Your test of
"($directory == 1)" no longer does the job. And it means that where
English's grammatical category of number necessitates only the two per-
mutations of the first sentence based on "directory [singular]" and
"directories [plural]", Arabic has three -- and, worse, in the second
sentence ("Your query matched %g file in %g directory."), where English
has four, Arabic has nine. You sense an unwelcome, exponential trend
taking shape.
Your Italian translator emails you back and says that "I searched 0
directories" (a possible English output of your program) is stilted,
and if you think that's fine English, that's your problem, but that
just will not do in the language of Dante. He insists that where
$directory_count is 0, your program should produce the Italian text for
"I didn't scan any directories.". And ditto for "I didn't match any
files in any directories", although he says the last part about "in any
directories" should probably just be left off.
You wonder how you'll get gettext to handle this; to accomodate the
ways Arabic, Chinese, and Italian deal with numbers in just these few
very simple phrases, you need to write code that will ask gettext for
different queries depending on whether the numerical values in question
are 1, 2, more than 2, or in some cases 0, and you still haven't fig-
ured out the problem with the different word order in Chinese.
Then your Russian translator calls on the phone, to personally tell you
the bad news about how really unpleasant your life is about to become:
Russian, like German or Latin, is an inflectional language; that is,
nouns and adjectives have to take endings that depend on their case
(i.e., nominative, accusative, genitive, etc...) -- which is roughly a
matter of what role they have in syntax of the sentence -- as well as
on the grammatical gender (i.e., masculine, feminine, neuter) and num-
ber (i.e., singular or plural) of the noun, as well as on the declen-
sion class of the noun. But unlike with most other inflected lan-
guages, putting a number-phrase (like "ten" or "forty-three", or their
Arabic numeral equivalents) in front of noun in Russian can change the
case and number that noun is, and therefore the endings you have to put
on it.
He elaborates: In "I scanned %g directories", you'd expect "directo-
ries" to be in the accusative case (since it is the direct object in
the sentnce) and the plural number, except where $directory_count is 1,
then you'd expect the singular, of course. Just like Latin or German.
But! Where $directory_count % 10 is 1 ("%" for modulo, remember),
assuming $directory count is an integer, and except where $direc-
tory_count % 100 is 11, "directories" is forced to become grammatically
singular, which means it gets the ending for the accusative singular...
You begin to visualize the code it'd take to test for the problem so
far, and still work for Chinese and Arabic and Italian, and how many
gettext items that'd take, but he keeps going... But where $direc-
tory_count % 10 is 2, 3, or 4 (except where $directory_count % 100 is
12, 13, or 14), the word for "directories" is forced to be genitive
singular -- which means another ending... The room begins to spin
around you, slowly at first... But with all other integer values,
since "directory" is an inanimate noun, when preceded by a number and
in the nominative or accusative cases (as it is here, just your luck!),
it does stay plural, but it is forced into the genitive case -- yet
another ending... And you never hear him get to the part about how
you're going to run into similar (but maybe subtly different) problems
with other Slavic languages like Polish, because the floor comes up to
meet you, and you fade into unconsciousness.
The above cautionary tale relates how an attempt at localization can
lead from programmer consternation, to program obfuscation, to a need
for sedation. But careful evaluation shows that your choice of tools
merely needed further consideration.
The Linguistic View
"It is more complicated than you think."
-- The Eighth Networking Truth, from RFC 1925
The field of Linguistics has expended a great deal of effort over the
past century trying to find grammatical patterns which hold across lan-
guages; it's been a constant process of people making generalizations
that should apply to all languages, only to find out that, all too
often, these generalizations fail -- sometimes failing for just a few
languages, sometimes whole classes of languages, and sometimes nearly
every language in the world except English. Broad statistical trends
are evident in what the "average language" is like as far as what its
rules can look like, must look like, and cannot look like. But the
"average language" is just as unreal a concept as the "average person"
-- it runs up against the fact no language (or person) is, in fact,
average. The wisdom of past experience leads us to believe that any
given language can do whatever it wants, in any order, with appeal to
any kind of grammatical categories wants -- case, number, tense, real
or metaphoric characteristics of the things that words refer to, arbi-
trary or predictable classifications of words based on what endings or
prefixes they can take, degree or means of certainty about the truth of
statements expressed, and so on, ad infinitum.
Mercifully, most localization tasks are a matter of finding ways to
translate whole phrases, generally sentences, where the context is rel-
atively set, and where the only variation in content is usually in a
number being expressed -- as in the example sentences above. Translat-
ing specific, fully-formed sentences is, in practice, fairly foolproof
-- which is good, because that's what's in the phrasebooks that so many
tourists rely on. Now, a given phrase (whether in a phrasebook or in a
gettext lexicon) in one language might have a greater or lesser appli-
cability than that phrase's translation into another language -- for
example, strictly speaking, in Arabic, the "your" in "Your query
matched..." would take a different form depending on whether the user
is male or female; so the Arabic translation "your[feminine] query" is
applicable in fewer cases than the corresponding English phrase, which
doesn't distinguish the user's gender. (In practice, it's not feasable
to have a program know the user's gender, so the masculine "you" in
Arabic is usually used, by default.)
But in general, such surprises are rare when entire sentences are being
translated, especially when the functional context is restricted to
that of a computer interacting with a user either to convey a fact or
to prompt for a piece of information. So, for purposes of localiza-
tion, translation by phrase (generally by sentence) is both the sim-
plest and the least problematic.
Breaking gettext
"It Has To Work."
-- First Networking Truth, RFC 1925
Consider that sentences in a tourist phrasebook are of two types: ones
like "How do I get to the marketplace?" that don't have any blanks to
fill in, and ones like "How much do these ___ cost?", where there's one
or more blanks to fill in (and these are usually linked to a list of
words that you can put in that blank: "fish", "potatoes", "tomatoes",
etc.) The ones with no blanks are no problem, but the fill-in-the-
blank ones may not be really straightforward. If it's a Swahili phrase-
book, for example, the authors probably didn't bother to tell you the
complicated ways that the verb "cost" changes its inflectional prefix
depending on the noun you're putting in the blank. The trader in the
marketplace will still understand what you're saying if you say "how
much do these potatoes cost?" with the wrong inflectional prefix on
"cost". After all, you can't speak proper Swahili, you're just a
tourist. But while tourists can be stupid, computers are supposed to
be smart; the computer should be able to fill in the blank, and still
have the results be grammatical.
In other words, a phrasebook entry takes some values as parameters (the
things that you fill in the blank or blanks), and provides a value
based on these parameters, where the way you get that final value from
the given values can, properly speaking, involve an arbitrarily complex
series of operations. (In the case of Chinese, it'd be not at all com-
plex, at least in cases like the examples at the beginning of this
article; whereas in the case of Russian it'd be a rather complex series
of operations. And in some languages, the complexity could be spread
around differently: while the act of putting a number-expression in
front of a noun phrase might not be complex by itself, it may change
how you have to, for example, inflect a verb elsewhere in the sentence.
This is what in syntax is called "long-distance dependencies".)
This talk of parameters and arbitrary complexity is just another way to
say that an entry in a phrasebook is what in a programming language
would be called a "function". Just so you don't miss it, this is the
crux of this article: A phrase is a function; a phrasebook is a bunch
of functions.
The reason that using gettext runs into walls (as in the above second-
person horror story) is that you're trying to use a string (or worse, a
choice among a bunch of strings) to do what you really need a function
for -- which is futile. Preforming (s)printf interpolation on the
strings which you get back from gettext does allow you to do some com-
mon things passably well... sometimes... sort of; but, to paraphrase
what some people say about "csh" script programming, "it fools you into
thinking you can use it for real things, but you can't, and you don't
discover this until you've already spent too much time trying, and by
then it's too late."
Replacing gettext
So, what needs to replace gettext is a system that supports lexicons of
functions instead of lexicons of strings. An entry in a lexicon from
such a system should not look like this:
"J'ai trouv\xE9 %g fichiers dans %g r\xE9pertoires"
[\xE9 is e-acute in Latin-1. Some pod renderers would scream if I used
the actual character here. -- SB]
but instead like this, bearing in mind that this is just a first stab:
sub I_found_X1_files_in_X2_directories {
my( $files, $dirs ) = @_[0,1];
$files = sprintf("%g %s", $files,
$files == 1 ? 'fichier' : 'fichiers');
$dirs = sprintf("%g %s", $dirs,
$dirs == 1 ? "r\xE9pertoire" : "r\xE9pertoires");
return "J'ai trouv\xE9 $files dans $dirs.";
}
Now, there's no particularly obvious way to store anything but strings
in a gettext lexicon; so it looks like we just have to start over and
make something better, from scratch. I call my shot at a gettext-
replacement system "Maketext", or, in CPAN terms, Locale::Maketext.
When designing Maketext, I chose to plan its main features in terms of
"buzzword compliance". And here are the buzzwords:
Buzzwords: Abstraction and Encapsulation
The complexity of the language you're trying to output a phrase in is
entirely abstracted inside (and encapsulated within) the Maketext mod-
ule for that interface. When you call:
print $lang->maketext("You have [quant,_1,piece] of new mail.",
scalar(@messages));
you don't know (and in fact can't easily find out) whether this will
involve lots of figuring, as in Russian (if $lang is a handle to the
Russian module), or relatively little, as in Chinese. That kind of
abstraction and encapsulation may encourage other pleasant buzzwords
like modularization and stratification, depending on what design deci-
sions you make.
Buzzword: Isomorphism
"Isomorphism" means "having the same structure or form"; in discussions
of program design, the word takes on the special, specific meaning that
your implementation of a solution to a problem has the same structure
as, say, an informal verbal description of the solution, or maybe of
the problem itself. Isomorphism is, all things considered, a good
thing -- it's what problem-solving (and solution-implementing) should
look like.
What's wrong the with gettext-using code like this...
printf( $file_count == 1 ?
( $directory_count == 1 ?
"Your query matched %g file in %g directory." :
"Your query matched %g file in %g directories." ) :
( $directory_count == 1 ?
"Your query matched %g files in %g directory." :
"Your query matched %g files in %g directories." ),
$file_count, $directory_count,
);
is first off that it's not well abstracted -- these ways of testing for
grammatical number (as in the expressions like "foo == 1 ?
singular_form : plural_form") should be abstracted to each language
module, since how you get grammatical number is language-specific.
But second off, it's not isomorphic -- the "solution" (i.e., the
phrasebook entries) for Chinese maps from these four English phrases to
the one Chinese phrase that fits for all of them. In other words, the
informal solution would be "The way to say what you want in Chinese is
with the one phrase 'For your question, in Y directories you would find
X files'" -- and so the implemented solution should be, isomorphically,
just a straightforward way to spit out that one phrase, with numerals
properly interpolated. It shouldn't have to map from the complexity of
other languages to the simplicity of this one.
Buzzword: Inheritance
There's a great deal of reuse possible for sharing of phrases between
modules for related dialects, or for sharing of auxiliary functions
between related languages. (By "auxiliary functions", I mean functions
that don't produce phrase-text, but which, say, return an answer to
"does this number require a plural noun after it?". Such auxiliary
functions would be used in the internal logic of functions that actu-
ally do produce phrase-text.)
In the case of sharing phrases, consider that you have an interface
already localized for American English (probably by having been written
with that as the native locale, but that's incidental). Localizing it
for UK English should, in practical terms, be just a matter of running
it past a British person with the instructions to indicate what few
phrases would benefit from a change in spelling or possibly minor
rewording. In that case, you should be able to put in the UK English
localization module only those phrases that are UK-specific, and for
all the rest, inherit from the American English module. (And I expect
this same situation would apply with Brazilian and Continental Por-
tugese, possbily with some very closely related languages like Czech
and Slovak, and possibly with the slightly different "versions" of
written Mandarin Chinese, as I hear exist in Taiwan and mainland
China.)
As to sharing of auxiliary functions, consider the problem of Russian
numbers from the beginning of this article; obviously, you'd want to
write only once the hairy code that, given a numeric value, would
return some specification of which case and number a given quanitified
noun should use. But suppose that you discover, while localizing an
interface for, say, Ukranian (a Slavic language related to Russian,
spoken by several million people, many of whom would be relieved to
find that your Web site's or software's interface is available in their
language), that the rules in Ukranian are the same as in Russian for
quantification, and probably for many other grammatical functions.
While there may well be no phrases in common between Russian and Ukra-
nian, you could still choose to have the Ukranian module inherit from
the Russian module, just for the sake of inheriting all the various
grammatical methods. Or, probably better organizationally, you could
move those functions to a module called "_E_Slavic" or something, which
Russian and Ukranian could inherit useful functions from, but which
would (presumably) provide no lexicon.
Buzzword: Concision
Okay, concision isn't a buzzword. But it should be, so I decree that
as a new buzzword, "concision" means that simple common things should
be expressible in very few lines (or maybe even just a few characters)
of code -- call it a special case of "making simple things easy and
hard things possible", and see also the role it played in the
MIDI::Simple language, discussed elsewhere in this issue [TPJ#13].
Consider our first stab at an entry in our "phrasebook of functions":
sub I_found_X1_files_in_X2_directories {
my( $files, $dirs ) = @_[0,1];
$files = sprintf("%g %s", $files,
$files == 1 ? 'fichier' : 'fichiers');
$dirs = sprintf("%g %s", $dirs,
$dirs == 1 ? "r\xE9pertoire" : "r\xE9pertoires");
return "J'ai trouv\xE9 $files dans $dirs.";
}
You may sense that a lexicon (to use a non-committal catch-all term for
a collection of things you know how to say, regardless of whether
they're phrases or words) consisting of functions expressed as above
would make for rather long-winded and repetitive code -- even if you
wisely rewrote this to have quantification (as we call adding a number
expression to a noun phrase) be a function called like:
sub I_found_X1_files_in_X2_directories {
my( $files, $dirs ) = @_[0,1];
$files = quant($files, "fichier");
$dirs = quant($dirs, "r\xE9pertoire");
return "J'ai trouv\xE9 $files dans $dirs.";
}
And you may also sense that you do not want to bother your translators
with having to write Perl code -- you'd much rather that they spend
their very costly time on just translation. And this is to say nothing
of the near impossibility of finding a commercial translator who would
know even simple Perl.
In a first-hack implementation of Maketext, each language-module's lex-
icon looked like this:
%Lexicon = (
"I found %g files in %g directories"
=> sub {
my( $files, $dirs ) = @_[0,1];
$files = quant($files, "fichier");
$dirs = quant($dirs, "r\xE9pertoire");
return "J'ai trouv\xE9 $files dans $dirs.";
},
... and so on with other phrase => sub mappings ...
);
but I immediately went looking for some more concise way to basically
denote the same phrase-function -- a way that would also serve to con-
cisely denote most phrase-functions in the lexicon for most languages.
After much time and even some actual thought, I decided on this system:
* Where a value in a %Lexicon hash is a contentful string instead of an
anonymous sub (or, conceivably, a coderef), it would be interpreted as
a sort of shorthand expression of what the sub does. When accessed for
the first time in a session, it is parsed, turned into Perl code, and
then eval'd into an anonymous sub; then that sub replaces the original
string in that lexicon. (That way, the work of parsing and evaling the
shorthand form for a given phrase is done no more than once per ses-
sion.)
* Calls to "maketext" (as Maketext's main function is called) happen
thru a "language session handle", notionally very much like an IO han-
dle, in that you open one at the start of the session, and use it for
"sending signals" to an object in order to have it return the text you
want.
So, this:
$lang->maketext("You have [quant,_1,piece] of new mail.",
scalar(@messages));
basically means this: look in the lexicon for $lang (which may inherit
from any number of other lexicons), and find the function that we hap-
pen to associate with the string "You have [quant,_1,piece] of new
mail" (which is, and should be, a functioning "shorthand" for this
function in the native locale -- English in this case). If you find
such a function, call it with $lang as its first parameter (as if it
were a method), and then a copy of scalar(@messages) as its second, and
then return that value. If that function was found, but was in string
shorthand instead of being a fully specified function, parse it and
make it into a function before calling it the first time.
* The shorthand uses code in brackets to indicate method calls that
should be performed. A full explanation is not in order here, but a
few examples will suffice:
"You have [quant,_1,piece] of new mail."
The above code is shorthand for, and will be interpreted as, this:
sub {
my $handle = $_[0];
my(@params) = @_;
return join '',
"You have ",
$handle->quant($params[1], 'piece'),
"of new mail.";
}
where "quant" is the name of a method you're using to quantify the noun
"piece" with the number $params[0].
A string with no brackety calls, like this:
"Your search expression was malformed."
is somewhat of a degerate case, and just gets turned into:
sub { return "Your search expression was malformed." }
However, not everything you can write in Perl code can be written in
the above shorthand system -- not by a long shot. For example, con-
sider the Italian translator from the beginning of this article, who
wanted the Italian for "I didn't find any files" as a special case,
instead of "I found 0 files". That couldn't be specified (at least not
easily or simply) in our shorthand system, and it would have to be
written out in full, like this:
sub { # pretend the English strings are in Italian
my($handle, $files, $dirs) = @_[0,1,2];
return "I didn't find any files" unless $files;
return join '',
"I found ",
$handle->quant($files, 'file'),
" in ",
$handle->quant($dirs, 'directory'),
".";
}
Next to a lexicon full of shorthand code, that sort of sticks out like
a sore thumb -- but this is a special case, after all; and at least
it's possible, if not as concise as usual.
As to how you'd implement the Russian example from the beginning of the
article, well, There's More Than One Way To Do It, but it could be
something like this (using English words for Russian, just so you know
what's going on):
"I [quant,_1,directory,accusative] scanned."
This shifts the burden of complexity off to the quant method. That
method's parameters are: the numeric value it's going to use to quan-
tify something; the Russian word it's going to quantify; and the param-
eter "accusative", which you're using to mean that this sentence's syn-
tax wants a noun in the accusative case there, although that quantifi-
cation method may have to overrule, for grammatical reasons you may
recall from the beginning of this article.
Now, the Russian quant method here is responsible not only for imple-
menting the strange logic necessary for figuring out how Russian num-
ber-phrases impose case and number on their noun-phrases, but also for
inflecting the Russian word for "directory". How that inflection is to
be carried out is no small issue, and among the solutions I've seen,
some (like variations on a simple lookup in a hash where all possible
forms are provided for all necessary words) are straightforward but can
become cumbersome when you need to inflect more than a few dozen words;
and other solutions (like using algorithms to model the inflections,
storing only root forms and irregularities) can involve more overhead
than is justifiable for all but the largest lexicons.
Mercifully, this design decision becomes crucial only in the hairiest
of inflected languages, of which Russian is by no means the worst case
scenario, but is worse than most. Most languages have simpler inflec-
tion systems; for example, in English or Swahili, there are generally
no more than two possible inflected forms for a given noun
("error/errors"; "kosa/makosa"), and the rules for producing these
forms are fairly simple -- or at least, simple rules can be formulated
that work for most words, and you can then treat the exceptions as just
"irregular", at least relative to your ad hoc rules. A simpler inflec-
tion system (simpler rules, fewer forms) means that design decisions
are less crucial to maintaining sanity, whereas the same decisions
could incur overhead-versus-scalability problems in languages like Rus-
sian. It may also be likely that code (possibly in Perl, as with Lin-
gua::EN::Inflect, for English nouns) has already been written for the
language in question, whether simple or complex.
Moreover, a third possibility may even be simpler than anything dis-
cussed above: "Just require that all possible (or at least applicable)
forms be provided in the call to the given language's quant method, as
in:"
"I found [quant,_1,file,files]."
That way, quant just has to chose which form it needs, without having
to look up or generate anything. While possibly not optimal for Rus-
sian, this should work well for most other languages, where quantifica-
tion is not as complicated an operation.
The Devil in the Details
There's plenty more to Maketext than described above -- for example,
there's the details of how language tags ("en-US", "i-pwn", "fi", etc.)
or locale IDs ("en_US") interact with actual module naming ("Bogo-
Query/Locale/en_us.pm"), and what magic can ensue; there's the details
of how to record (and possibly negotiate) what character encoding Make-
text will return text in (UTF8? Latin-1? KOI8?). There's the interest-
ing fact that Maketext is for localization, but nowhere actually has a
""use locale;"" anywhere in it. For the curious, there's the somewhat
frightening details of how I actually implement something like data
inheritance so that searches across modules' %Lexicon hashes can
parallel how Perl implements method inheritance.
And, most importantly, there's all the practical details of how to
actually go about deriving from Maketext so you can use it for your
interfaces, and the various tools and conventions for starting out and
maintaining individual language modules.
That is all covered in the documentation for Locale::Maketext and the
modules that come with it, available in CPAN. After having read this
article, which covers the why's of Maketext, the documentation, which
covers the how's of it, should be quite straightfoward.
The Proof in the Pudding: Localizing Web Sites
Maketext and gettext have a notable difference: gettext is in C, acces-
sible thru C library calls, whereas Maketext is in Perl, and really
can't work without a Perl interpreter (although I suppose something
like it could be written for C). Accidents of history (and not neces-
sarily lucky ones) have made C++ the most common language for the
implementation of applications like word processors, Web browsers, and
even many in-house applications like custom query systems. Current
conditions make it somewhat unlikely that the next one of any of these
kinds of applications will be written in Perl, albeit clearly more for
reasons of custom and inertia than out of consideration of what is the
right tool for the job.
However, other accidents of history have made Perl a well-accepted lan-
guage for design of server-side programs (generally in CGI form) for
Web site interfaces. Localization of static pages in Web sites is
trivial, feasable either with simple language-negotiation features in
servers like Apache, or with some kind of server-side inclusions of
language-appropriate text into layout templates. However, I think that
the localization of Perl-based search systems (or other kinds of
dynamic content) in Web sites, be they public or access-restricted, is
where Maketext will see the greatest use.
I presume that it would be only the exceptional Web site that gets
localized for English and Chinese and Italian and Arabic and Russian,
to recall the languages from the beginning of this article -- to say
nothing of German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Finnish, and Hindi, to
name a few languages that benefit from large numbers of programmers or
Web viewers or both.
However, the ever-increasing internationalization of the Web (whether
measured in terms of amount of content, of numbers of content writers
or programmers, or of size of content audiences) makes it increasingly
likely that the interface to the average Web-based dynamic content ser-
vice will be localized for two or maybe three languages. It is my hope
that Maketext will make that task as simple as possible, and will
remove previous barriers to localization for languages dissimilar to
English.
__END__
Sean M. Burke (sburke@cpan.org) has a Master's in linguistics from
Northwestern University; he specializes in language technology. Jordan
Lachler (lachler@unm.edu) is a PhD student in the Department of Lin-
guistics at the University of New Mexico; he specializes in morphology
and pedagogy of North American native languages.
References
Alvestrand, Harald Tveit. 1995. RFC 1766: Tags for the Identification
of Languages. "ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1766.txt" [Now see RFC
3066.]
Callon, Ross, editor. 1996. RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths.
"ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1925.txt"
Drepper, Ulrich, Peter Miller, and Francois Pinard. 1995-2001. GNU
"gettext". Available in "ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/", with exten-
sive docs in the distribution tarball. [Since I wrote this article in
1998, I now see that the gettext docs are now trying more to come to
terms with plurality. Whether useful conclusions have come from it is
another question altogether. -- SMB, May 2001]
Forbes, Nevill. 1964. Russian Grammar. Third Edition, revised by J.
C. Dumbreck. Oxford University Press.
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