Jim DeLaHunt, world-ready

Another stimulating Internationalisation and Unicode Conference (IUC36) just finished up last week (October 22-24, 2012). As usual it was rich with interesting people, stimulating subjects, and inspiration. My tutorial, Building multilingual websites in Drupal 7 and Joomla! 2.5, was well-attended and seemed to go well. My final paper and slides are posted at the preceding link.

Continue Reading »

No Comments »

Once again I was fortunate enough to be invited to present at this year’s Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC). I have posted the paper and slides for my tutorial, Building Multilingual Websites in Drupal and Joomla, over on jdlh.com.

This was my abstract, from the Unicode conference program for my talk: Continue Reading »

1 Comment »

There is a lot of international, multilingual, and multicultural activity in Vancouver. Also, there’s a thriving tech scene. But there’s no place for the people in the intersection of those two circles — those interested in and working on the internationalisation, localisation, and multilingual aspects of technology projects — to get together and share ideas. I think there ought to be.

And I’ll even propose a name: IMLIG1604, the I18n L10n M11l I6t G3p (Internationalisation, Localisation, and Multilingual Interest Group) for North America’s 604 area code. If you can decipher the title, you’re in the club!

Continue Reading »

No Comments »

What “twanguage” do you “tweet”?  Twitter, the buzzing conversation of brief web and SMS messsages, exploded into wide use in 2009. But just how wide?  To how many countries has it spread?  And into which languages?  I’m aiming to find out.

I’ve started a project named “Twanguages”, a language census of a sample of Twitter’s global traffic. I’m curious: which are the top languages? Are #hashtags localised? How does language correlate with location?  And which Unicode character is the most rarely used?

I’ll be  presenting our results at the 33rd Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC33), held in San Jose, California, on October 14-16, 2009. I have a place cleared for a Twanguages project page, and I’ll post interim results there as they become available (right now it’s only a placeholder). Stay tuned!

Continue Reading »

No Comments »

Last week I gave a presentation, International and multilingual Drupal and Joomla! sites. I’ve posted my slides and handouts at that link for anyone who wants to catch up on them.

The occasion was LinuxFest Northwest 2009, held at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, WA, USA. It was a delightful event. It’s thoroughly grassroots and volunteer, it has a friendly and accessible vibe, yet it attracts very knowledgeable people.

Continue Reading »

No Comments »

Do you know a blog which is by or for people in BC, and is in some language other than English?  If so, submit it for the BC Polyglot Blog Directory!

I created this directory in honour of the 2009 Northern Voice conference, which starts tomorrow at UBC. I wanted to highlight all those minority-language bloggers in BC.  In a little bit of searching I already have blogs in French, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese. I fully expect to find blogs in simplified Chinese and Punjabi as well. After all, 18% of people BC use a language other than English at home, according to Statistics Canada and the 2006 census.

I’ve created the directory on my site, at http://jdlh.com/en/pr/bc_polyglot_blogs.html. See the Rules and Q&A there for more information. You can submit listings for the directory by leaving a comment on this post, or by sending a message using that website’s Contact form for Jim DeLaHunt. Please supply the name of the blog, the URL, the language(s) in which it publishes, where the blog is located, and what geography it addresses.

I look forward to seeing this baby grow!

No Comments »

Right!  I was supposed to announce this three weeks ago!

I’ve posted the slides from my Dec 10 presentation, “Expand your reach with a successful multilingual web strategy”.  I gave this talk to the  Vancouver chapter of the International Internet Marketing Association (IIMA)’s monthly meeting.

Continue Reading »

No Comments »

Does anybody know of a simple script-detection algorithm (or heuristic) for font switching?

This came up with one of my clients. Suppose you have a guest book on your web site, and seven visitors left you the following inspiring messages:

1. すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由であり、かつ、尊厳と権利とについて平等である。
2. 人人生而自由,在尊严和权利上一律平等。
3. Semua orang dilahirkan merdeka dan mempunyai martabat dan hak-hak yang sama.
4. 人人生而自由，在尊嚴和權利上一律平等。
5. Alle Menschen sind frei und gleich an Würde und Rechten geboren.
6. ‘Ολοι οι άνθρωποι γεννιούνται ελεύθεροι και ίσοι στην αξιοπρέπεια και τα δικαιώματα.
7. 모든 인간은 태어날 때부터 자유로우며 그 존엄과 권리에 있어 동등하다.

(It looks like your visitors all read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights courtesy of the UDHR in Unicode project).

Now suppose you are so touched that you want to lay out all seven messages in a PDF file, and print it out as a booklet.  You have a beautiful layout template, and various complementary fonts: Latin script, Japanese, Korean, simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Greek script.

Which font to you apply to each message?  More importantly, is there a simple heuristic by which software can make the choice? (More after the jump.)

Continue Reading »

1 Comment »

There is a Joomla! Day in Vancouver this Saturday. I’ll be giving a brief presentation, on jdlh.com as an example of a multilingual Joomla! website, with human-friendly URLs.

Continue Reading »

1 Comment »

Oh right, I forgot to mention: I’ve been accepted to present to the 32nd Internationalization & Unicode Conference this September! I’m presenting on a topic which I’ve been working on lately: multilingual websites. The title is: Web 2.0 goes to Babel: Multilingual websites and user-supplied content.

Continue Reading »

No Comments »