(Apologies for the double post on fedora-i18n-list, but I want to keep the thread together. Please reply to this message, not the first one.) G'day all, I think we should make use of pseudo-locales to test Fedora. [--- I ŧⱨîňⱪ ש𝖾 šⱨøմŀđ ოåⱪ𝖾 մš𝖾 øϝ Þš𝖾մđø-ŀøçåŀ𝖾š ŧø ŧ𝖾šŧ F𝖾đøяå. ---] (In case UTF-8 doesn't make it to everyone's mail client intact, the above sentence should like similar to the first one, except that the lower case characters have been replaced by other similar-looking Unicode characters. A couple of the characters don't fit into 16 bits, and really gave my text editors some trouble!) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-translation and http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnste/archive/2006/06/27/647915.aspx for more about pseudo-locales. Microsoft actually used three different pseudo-locales to test Vista, with things like reverse sorting, right-to-left characters, and large character sets. To me, the main advantages of pseudo-localisation are the ability to test some aspects of i18n without having to wait for translations to be turned around, and allowing English-only speakers to test i18n areas, which is otherwise extremely difficult. I have a simple Ant task which can generate pseudo-translations like the one above from a gettext POT files, but I'm not suggesting that we should integrate my humble Ant task into the makefiles of thousands of Fedora packages. If the gettext runtime code that fetches translations from .mo files (in glibc?) were to recognise a pseudo-locale id, it could generate pseudo-translations on the fly from the English text. Admittedly, there's a little more to it than simple character substitution. The pseudo-translator has to avoid changing things like variable names and html tags, but a few rules (eg don't modify anything between angle/square/curly brackets, don't touch %d/%s/etc) would cover 95% of cases. In the other cases, you might mess up some HTML or fail to expand a variable, but only users who choose to use a pseudo-locale would ever see these problems. Would there be any interest in getting something like this into glibc? [--- S𝖾åň ---] PS this could make sense for the OpenJDK too, but that's another story. -- Sean Flanigan Senior Software Engineer Engineering - Internationalisation Red Hat
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