Pseudo-locales for i18n testing by English speakers

Ding-Yi Chen dchen at redhat.com
Thu Oct 2 06:41:10 UTC 2008


The pseudo locale is intriguing, and I assume it helps at some degree.
However, this approach does have its own limitation:

1. Lack of font support: as the attachment "lack_of_font.png" shows, the
pseudo locale might be rendered useless if all developers can see are
unicode boxes. :-P Perhaps we should specifiy the minimal font set as
remedy.

2. It doesn't really solve the language specific problem. Take Chinese
characters sorting for example, they can be sorted by
Pinyin, Zhuyin, radical, number of strokes, and "natural" order such as
numberial characters. The sorting is impossible to verify without the
knowledge.

Still, the idea itself is good. And surely it filters out some of the
bugs without the help of translaters.

Since the main purpose of pseudo locale is for testing, shall we agree
on a list of pseudo locales which have their own specified behaviour?

Regards,
Ding-Yi Chen


於 四,2008-10-02 於 14:55 +1000,Sean Flanigan 提到:
> (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 lower case characters have been replaced by other similar-looking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.
> -- 
> fedora-devel-list mailing list
> fedora-devel-list at redhat.com
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