A bit of lexicographic navelgazing

Sometimes it’s not the developers fault. Shocking, I know. Sometimes, it’s the linguistic community (using the term loosely) who is at fault for not asking for the right thing.

Just in case you didn’t believe me…

I was looking up something in my Mojave dictionary to other week (don’t ask), followed by a Google search which pointed me at a Gaelic dictionary for administrative terminology. While the two are probably some 15 years apart, they have one thing in common. They’re both “flat” documents (there’s probably a niftier term but I can’t think of it). The Mojave dictionary is a ring-bound, printed dictionary, the Gaelic one some form of PDF. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have a love affair with dictionaries – I collect dictionaries like my mother shoes and handbags. So the more the merrier.

But what also hit me is how much of a debt of gratitude the Scottish Gaelic world owes a chap called Kevin Scannell. While doing some research in Dublin, we met at the Club Cónradh na Gaeilge for a pint and a chat about Irish IT and he explained to me, in short and simple phrases, what a lexical database is and why anyone should give a monkey’s about having one. That chat came at a pivotal moment because, having just finished the digitization of Dwelly’s classical Gaelic dictionary, I had both come to realise some of the inherent shortcomings of paper dictionaries in digital form and I was at the cusp of embarking on the development of what is now the Faclair Beag along with Will Robertson.

Now there are many forms a lexical database can take but essentially the difference between a massive wordlist and a lexical database is that in the database you don’t just list words but you also mark them for what they are. For example, rather than having file, grunt, apple, horse, with, and in a comma separated list, such a database would mark file, grunt, apple and horse as being a singular noun, a second instance of file and grunt as regular verbs, and as a conjunction and with as a preposition. You can get a lot more fancy than that but at a very basic level, that’s the difference.

So what you might say, you still end up with a dictionary at the other end and doing a database involves a whole lot of extra work. Tru dat, but the other word I learned on that trip was the word future proofing. What that means is that if you write a beautiful dictionary as a flat text document, you get just that, a beautiful dictionary. Useful, and for many centuries the only kind available. But that was down to technical limitations, not necessarily choice. Anyway, such a dictionary is future proof only to a certain extent. If it’s digital (as opposed to typed, which unbelievably still happens…) you can edit bits for an new edition. You can put it online and, with a bit of messing about, even turn it into a searchable dictionary. But that’s just about it, anything beyond that involves an insane amount of extra work. For example, your dictionary may list 20,000 heardwords but there will be a lot of word forms which aren’t headwords: plurals, past tenses, words which only appear in examples but not as headwords and so on.

But I can look up the plural of goose. Yes, that’s true but say for example you wanted to do something beyond that. For example, you might be a linguist interested in word frequencies, wanting to find out how common certain words are. Do a word search in your text? Possible, but then you end up with a number for goose and another for geese. And in some languages the list of forms a word can take is huge, in Gaelic the goose can show up as gèadh, ghèadh, geòidh, gheòidh, gèadhaibh and ghèadhaibh.

But it’s not just nice for linguists. The applications of even a basic lexical database are impressive. Let me continue with the practical example to illustrate this. If you search for bean in the Faclair Beag, you end up seeing this entry at the top:

But what the casual dictionary user does not realise is that behind the scenes, things look a little different:

We decided to keep it fairly simple and devised different tables for the different types of words we get in Gaelic – feminine and masculine nouns, verbs, prepositions and so on. And for each, we made a table which covers the different possible forms of each word. For a Gaelic noun, that means lenition, datives, genitives, vocatives, singular and plural, plus a junk field for anything that might be exceptional.

Yes, it’s a bit of extra work but one immediate benefit is that because each form is tied to the ID of the root, it doesn’t matter if a user sticks in a form like mhnàthadh – the dictionary will still know what to look for. That’s a decided bonus for people who are inexperienced or looking for a rare inflected form they’re unsure of. It also cuts down the number See x entries because if two words are simply variations of the same root (like crèadh and criadh in Gaelic which are both pronounced the same way and mean the same thing). So usability is an immediate benefit.

Next benefit is an almost instantaneous and updatable spellchecker – as long as the data you punch in is clean, all you have to do is export the table and dump it in Hunspell for example. Ok, it involves a little more fiddling that that but compared to the task of extracting all words from a flat text file, it’s a doddle. For example, I was asked if we could do something for Cornish based on the Single Written Form dictionary. The answer was yes, but I don’t have time to extract all the words manually. In addition, our spellchecker is a lot leaner and smarter as a result because we were able to define certain rules, rather than multiply entries. For example, Gaelic has emphatic endings that can be added to any noun: -sa, -se, -san etc. So rather than add them manually to each noun, Kevin could just write a rule that said: if the table says it’s a noun, allow these endings. Simples.

Ok, so you get a spellchecker, big deal. It is, actually but anyway, another spin-off was predictive texting for Gaelic (again with help from the indefatigable Kevin), because all we had to do was to take the list and fiddle with the ranking. Simplifying a bit but again, when compared to doing it manually off a flat text file, it’s a lot less work. Another spin-off was a digital Scrabble for Gaelic and several other word games like hangman. Oh, the University of Arizona asked for a copy to help them tag some Gaelic texts. And we’re not finished by a long shot.

Did I mention the maps? Perhaps too long a story for here but using our database we have been able to build dialect maps on steroids, like this one here indicating the word in question is southern:

And I’m sure there are other uses that we haven’t even though of yet but whatever the development, we’re fairly future proof in the sense that with a bit of manipulation, we can make our dictionary data dance, sing, foxtrot and rumba, not just perform Za Zen.

Which brings me back to my original point. People in the world of small languages could benefit from doing their homework and rather than rushing into something, go a bit more slowly and build something that is resilient for the future – even if “Let’s do a dictionary and publish it next year” sound waaaay sexier. A database is something most developers can build and while it takes a bit more time, you don’t require a rocket scientist to add the language data – but in order to get it built, you have to ask for it in the first place.

Hidden, hidden, gone?

I’m compuzzled, as my old flatmate would say. Why is it that software projects often hide their nicest features away in the dark little corners of a site? Are they afraid it might be successful? Are they trying to hedge their bets in case it flops? Or are the explanations even more complicated?

Not sure I have the answer but let me expand with an example or two to begin with. You may remember my post on doing predictive texting in Gaelic, Irish and Manx. A short while ago, when talking to the developers over at Adaptxt learned to my dismay that while they were keen on enabling the technology on iPhone and Windows Phones, neither was going to happen. I already knew about iPhones being anal-retentive when it comes to localization and entry methods but I was dismayed that Windows seemed to be going down the same root. Not that I have or will have a Windows Phone but I’m not the measure of things. Other people might well buy one. Wait, so we may well get a localized version of the Windows Phone but no predictive texting in Gaelic? Surely not… So I decided to do a little digging and found that apart from the developers at Adaptxt sadly being right, the Windows Phone site has a feature suggestion tool.

Incidentally, we have a small campaign going to lobby Microsoft to allow 3rd Party Entry Methods (or, in English, the option for people to develop, offer and install tools like predictive texting in languages Microsoft isn’t interested in). Every vote counts

But anyway, it’s a nice idea, a feature suggestion page. So why is it hidden underneath so many layers? I actually have no idea how you’re supposed to reach that page from the front page and only happened to chance across it through some crafty manipulation of Google (I’m not a developer but I’m very good at finding stuff on the web…). Are they afraid people might actually participate en masse? Are they worried a developer might have to confront the fact that in reality, feature X sucks?

Google went through an even stranger metamorphosis. Back in the early days when Google was still new, they tried very hard to get folk involved and localization featured quite prominently in that. So the link to the Google In Your Language project was quite prominent and, naturally, I jumped at the chance of putting Gaelic on Google. What happened then was a bit like the St Brigid’s cross shrinkage in the RTÉ logo… first the prominent link went. Well.. ok, I had bookmarked it and it wasn’t that hard to find via a search. The the associated forum went dead. Then Google In Your Language was axed (of course without telling the translators). Bizarrely, the page is still up proclaiming that

Google believes that fast and accurate searching has universal value. That’s why we are eager to offer our service in all the languages scattered upon the face of the earth. We need your help to make this a reality.

You can volunteer to translate Google’s help information and search interface into your favorite language. By helping with our translation process you ensure that Google will be available in your language of choice more quickly and with a better interface than it would have otherwise. There is no minimum commitment. You can translate a phrase, a page or our entire site. Once we have enough of the site translated, we will make it available in the language you are requesting.

If you are interested in helping us, please read the translation style guide, frequently asked questions list, and the legal stuff. Then click on the link at the right to sign up as a volunteer.

We hope you enjoy working on our Google translation project and thank you for helping to make Google a truly worldwide web service.

Ha bloody ha. These days the cynical part of myself poses the question if they had always planned this or if this was something that just happened? We’ll probably never know as nobody knows nutting or at least nobody is telling us nuttin. But I wouldn’t put it past them to have done the cynical thing.

Or maybe organisations like Microsoft and Google are just as badly organised as smaller organisations. I know of at least one online dictionary project where the publisher, an academic institution, ummed and erred about whether to produce a digital searchable version of dictionary or not. Over several years. When it looked like they were just going to let it die a silent death, someone with a bit of chutzpah just did it and stuck in on a corner of the institutions website. At some point it had become such an institution that it was quietly accepted as the status quo – which of course also meant they didn’t have to support it financially. Accident or design? Who knows. Badly organised in any case.

So is it just sheer incompetence, a lack of imagination or empowerment, too many or not enough hoops that one has to jump through? I don’t know but it sure is annoying… in this spirit, time for a glass of Chambord a kind soul donated. Slàinte mhòr!

Needle in a haystack

It’s been a strange sort of end to the week. I e-met a new language and came face to face with a linguistic, digital needle in a cyberhaystack. Ok, I’m not making much sense so far, I know… just setting the scene!

We all know Skype, the new version of which (quoting my hilarious brother) “convinces through less functionality and more bugs”.  Back when Skype still belonged to itself, I eventually discovered the fact that, at least on Windows, it’s pretty easy to localize. You go to Tools » Change Language » Edit Skype Language file and right down there where everyone can see it, you have the option to save the English.lang file (which contains the English strings) under a new name and add your own translation. So back in 2011 I started working on a Gaidhlig.lang and by early 2012 had finally caught up with all the updates that kept getting in the way.

The Li Niha (Nias) interface

 

What does one do when one has completed a translation? Sure, you submit it to the project and ask them to bundle it, release it, whatever. Not so fast, buckoes… Due to “size issues” (I’d like to remind everyone at this point that currently, a full language file weighs in at a massive 400KB), Skype only bundles the usual 20 or so suspects, CJK (that’s Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and a bunch of European languages with the install file. Since they never though of adding an Install new language function that could pull a file from some repository, the short of it was that even having localized the lot, you were on your own. Sure, you could post the file as an attachment on the forum but then who goes trawling through a forum in search of a language file?

Using the usual “Gaelic” channels, I think we’ve reached a reasonable number of people so far but certainly less than we would have reached had it been “inside the program itself.

But before I knock the old forum too much, I should point out that it actually had a dedicated localization section. Why do I mention this? Because, moving to the next episode where we finally meet Mr Big, when Skype was bought by Microsoft, the forums were wiped and *cough* improved. That’s right, the localization section went. Especially the parts where people were trying very hard to figure out how to turn a .lang file into something that Linux and MacOS could digest. Am I glad I took copies of the bits that were useful…

Anyway, even in the new forum, the localization questions never went away. But the stock answer of the one admin who bothers to check that corner is always that “there’s no news”. In fairness, I don’t think he actually has the power to do anything, he’s just the unfortunate person who has to interact with, shock and horror, the users. So even though Skype was first launched in 2003, here we are in 2012 still asking the same questions – why can’t you bundle our language, why can’t we convert/localize the files for MacOS/Linux and how about frickin plural formatting?

Yep, “there’s no news”. The chap working on Welsh then had an interesting suggestion – can’t we host them on SourceForge? You see, the problem with distributing the files via the forum is that once your post moves off the first page, who’s going to see it? So, brilliant idea I thought and we went about setting up a project. Nothing fancy, just the .lang files which don’t come bundled with Skype and a few Wiki pages with guidance.

Seeing I had a quiet day and since my contributions in terms of code are… amusing, I decided to hit the web to locate all the .lang files out there, or as many of them as possible anyway – I may suck at code but I rock at websearches! Half a day later, I had the most amazing collection of languages. Some I had known about – Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish, Irish and Uyghur – as their translators had been active on the forum. Some were part of the usual suspects but some were totally unexpected and one I’d never even heard about which is, as a matter of fact, rather unusual. So in the end, we had:

1. Adyghe
2. Afrikaans
3. Albanian
4. Armenian
5. Basque
6. Breton
7. Chuvash
8. Cornish
9. Erzya
10. Esperanto
11. Faroese
12. Gaelic
13. Irish
14. Ligurian
15. Macedonian
16. Mirandese
17. Nias
18. Tajik
19. Tamil
20. Uyghur (Persion and Latin script)
21. Welsh

Definitely wow. Admittedly, not all are complete but it’s still one of the most diverse lists I’ve ever come across, even if there are no languages from the Americas in the list. Especially Adyghe, Chuvash and Erzya are not languages you normally see on localization projects. And Nias I had never even heard about. Turns out it’s a language of some 700,000 speakers off the coast of Sumatra. That certainly cheered me up. Yeah I know, geek

But what made me shake my head all afternoon was something else – the lengths I had to go to in manipulating my websearches and the places I found some of them. Gaelic I had, Welsh, Albanian and Cornish came of Skype’s forum. Basque (normally a rather well organized language) I found embedded as a .obj file on some archived forum post. Adyghe, Chuvash and Erzya came of some websites that looked a bit like a forum where someone had posted, in the case of Erzya without linebreaks, the translations – in two cases, with the Russian strings still embedded so I had to strip those out first before creating the .lang files. Armenian came out of a public DropBox and Breton off the Ofis ar Brezhoneg website. Afrikaans was on some unlinked page on someone’s personal website. Esperanto was on the Wiki of the Universala Esperanto Asocio but it took me some time to figure that in order to get the strings, I had to trawl through the page history as someone had at some point – accidentally or deliberately – deleted them. Mirandese and Nias were in some silent loop on abandoned university websites – probably student projects from long ago. And one came off a file sharing site, I forget which, making me seriously wonder if I was downloading porn, a virus or actually the .lang file. I actually even found Kurdish but the people who did that seem to have accidentally stripped out the string names so having explained the problem, they’re trying to match them together again as my Kurdish isn’t that baş.

I didn’t quite know whether to congratulate myself or whether to cry. All that effort, all those wonderfully selfless people putting their time and effort into translating something into their language. And then, because the people making money off it couldn’t be bothered, we ended up with these needles in the cyberhaystack. Crying is still an option I feel…

It’s nice to know they’re on SourcForge now (check out SkypeInYourLanguage) and that there’s a few people willing to put some time into making the process a bit better but by gum guys… if people are actually willing to help you make more money by making your product available in more languages, how about giving them a leg up, rather than the finger?

Wishful thinking à la Bretonne

Have you noticed that sometimes developers DO get it right but then are faced with strange user behaviours? No, I’m not talking about developers thinking that something should be the case, which isn’t. I’m talking about a strange chain of events on Facebook which makes me doubt the motivation of some language activists (yes, we’re allowed to self-criticize guys!).

We all know about Facebook. What we don’t all know about Facebook is that they have a pretty bizarre approach to translations (we can hardly call it localization…) and I don’t mean the fact they, for the most part, rely on community volunteers. No, it’s the process. There’s no clear process of adding or registering a new project and heaven knows how they actually pick the languages. At one point, Rumantsch was in (it now isn’t, no idea how it got in or why it’s now out, it’s a fairly small language with between 35,000 and 60,000 speakers), as is Northern Sami, Irish, Mongol and the usual big boys, including some questionable choices like Leet Speak and Pirate. So most languages are out. Not surprisingly, this has led to a number of Facebook groups and campaigns by people trying to get their  languages into the project. There used to be a project page full of posts along the lines of “please add my language” and “how do we get Facebook to add our language?” – universally met with thundering silence. Admins were rarer than Lord Howe Island stick insects.

Back in whenever, a chap called Neskie Manuel had a crafty idea, about getting his language, Secwepemctsín, onto Facebook. Why not, he figured, find a way of overlaying Facebook with a “translation skin” in order to make the process of translation (and in this case even localization) independent of Facebook & Co? It was a neat idea, which was somewhat interrupted by his sad and untimely death.

Now, round about the same time, two things happened. The Bretons set up a “Facebook in Breton” compaign. Fair enough. And a chap called Kevin Scannell took on board Neskie’s Facebook idea. Excellent. Before too long, the Facebook group had over 12,000 members and Kevin had released his script for a slew of amazing languages. It overlays not all of Facebook but just the most visible strings (the one’s we see daily, not the boring EULAs and junk). Even more amazingly, it can handle stuff Facebook hasn’t even woken up to yet, such as plurals, case marking and so on. Wow indeed.

The languages hailed from the four corners of the planet, from Aragonese, Manx and Nawat through Hiligaynon, Secwepemctsín, Samoan, K’iche’ and Māori to Kunwinjku and Gundjeihmi (two Australian languages). Wow indeed. And, of course Breton.

Now here’s the bizarre thing though. Ok, it’s not the full thing but who’d turn down a sandwich while waiting for a roast chicken that might never appear? No one, you’d think, so based on a combined market share of some 50% between Firefox and Chrome, some 200,000 speakers and 12,000 people in the “Facebook in Breton” group, you’d expect what, anything north of 6,000 enthusiastic users of the Breton script. After all, more than 1,100 people installed it in Scottish Gaelic (less than 60,000 speakers) and more than 500 people in Manx (way less than 2,000 fluent speakers).

A case of “you’d think” indeed. To date, a mind-boggling 450 people have installed it in Breton. As far as I can tell, the translation is good and was done by a single, highly fluent speaker (Fulup Jakez who works for Ofis ar Brezhoneg). So it’s not a quality issue. The scripts work (I use the Gaelic one) so it’s not that either. The Facebook group was notified several times, so it’s not like they didn’t know. Ok, so maybe not all Likes of the group actually are from speakers, fair enough, but glancing through the active posters, a lot of them seem to be in the right “linguistic area”.

So while the groupies are still foaming at the mouth about the lack of support from Zuckerberg and Co, there’s a perfectly good interim that would allow you to say Kenavo to French and Degemer mat to Breton on Facebook every day. I really don’t get it. Is it really the case that some activists are more in love with the idea of the thing than would actually use it if it was around? Or am I missing something really obvious? I sure hope I am…

On a more positive note, I hope the general idea of this type of “overlay” will eventually take off big time. We will never be able to convince the big boys to support all the languages on the planet, all of which are equally worthy of services in their own languages, whether they’re trying to re-grow lost speakers or whether they’re just a small to medium sized community. So having a tool that puts control over what we see on our screens into our hands would be great. No more running from company to company trying to make the case for adding language X, a little less duplication (I don’t know how many zillion times I’ve translated “Edit picture”), better quality and more focus on the important bits of an interface to translate (not the EULA for example… a document that sadly every software company is keen to have translated as soon as possible without ever asking who’ll read it). Ach well, I can hope…

All look same, eh?

I must have been an elephant in another life, given how much time I seem to spend these days shaking my head over “avoidable stupidity”. Or maybe I’m just becoming a grumpy old man. That might be it – I’m losing the ability of youth to look at a slice of cold pizza and go “yummmm”. These days, I look at it and think “The cheese is hard, the cat sniffed it, I can’t even remember when I ordered it” and chuck it out. Ah but I digress.

This week’s headshaker is the way we seem to be loosing control to the developers, control over things that should not be in the remit of developers. Things like letting some algorithm “identify” the language of web content and adjusting my search results based on that. Who dreamt that up? No idea but I bet he was white, monolingual and only had the faintest notion that apart from English, there’s that thing the people making tacos speak and then maybe the thing the Chinese takeaway people use. Choice of three – easy, if L does not equal English, check for non-Latin. If it’s non-Latin in must be Chinese, if it is, it’s Spanish. At least that’s the way it comes across.

The problem is, dear developer, that there’s a great many languages out there and there’s quite a few which are fairly close to each other. Like Irish and Scottish Gaelic for example. So if you’re decide to automatically identify content by language and modify my search results based on that, then bloody well make sure you get it right! Anything else is just seriously annoying unless you give me the option of manually tweaking it.

Given that it’s not like it’s impossible to teach a computer to figure out the difference (for one, Irish uses acutes, Gaelic graves… the one goes up, the other one down, see?) it also raises the question of exactly whom they’re getting to program this stuff? High school students?

Probably not actually, I suspect they’re all really good at code. But listening to my other half, a business consultant with his very own set of why-oh-why’s, I suspect the problem actually is NOT the ability to do code. It’s lack of guidance at all levels. The way big companies hire folk these days goes something like this:

1. Company A identifies an apparent problem. Without making sure they identify the root cause, they call for a Fixer-of-Problem-A. First mistake. You’re granny breaking her ankle may be the apparent problem but without checking, you don’t know if the problem is actually osteoporosis.
2. So, having rightly or wrongly identified the problem, these days, a job spec gets sent to an agency. Second mistake. They usually get the wrong person to write the job spec, which means the agency is already at the receiving end of a potential mis-diagnosis and a badly written job spec. I’ve seen some of these… the really bad ones are the equivalent of needing a plumber and calling for someone with a proven track record in “the physical aspects of interior decoration as relates to waste disposal”. Yes. THAT bad.
3. So we move onto mistake four. The agency usually adds its own flavour of inane, if not misleading, waffle. Using the plumber again, they add something about needing an end-to-end CV showing more than 20 years of experience in toilet seat lifting in blue-chip companies.
4. Because it’s an IT related job everyone on this daisy chain assumes that the fixer and/or overseer of the fixing have to be IT people. Wrong. Fifth mistake. Of course you need IT folk to do the black magic but the overseer of the circus does not have to be one. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that they shouldn’t be one. Developers, when left to their own devices, tend to lose themselves in coding “fun” stuff. A failing I guess we all suffer from in our respective domains but for some reason, we let developers get away with policing themselves. In other words, a herd of sheep needs a sheepdog and a shepherd for guidance and direction, not another sheep. The sheepdog and shepherd should have a track record of having dealt with sheep but they don’t have to be sheep themselves.

I reckon it’s this nauseating daisy-chain of mistakes which blesses us with nonsense like the above. We need the coder to do the fancy stuff which, for example, helps identify the content of web pages. Jolly good, I can see the use of that if well done. But it should not be left to the developers to decide that is what’s needed right now, what it will do, how it gets tested, how it gets implemented and how to make sure the user has the necessary control over it if they need it. For that, we need a shepherd who’s not a sheep. If we manage that, I suspect we’d see fewer Siris, fewer counter-intuitive user interfaces, better language in the interfaces and a way of stopping Google from asking me every two seconds if I want to translate this damn page. No, I’m multilingual, and besides, running Irish machine translation over Gaelic won’t work anyway, dammit!

One forward and two to the side

The debate about digital technology and localization and internationalization has probably raged in one form or other ever since someone invented the first program. Mind, for me personally it goes back to that ill-fated moment when ASCII was born with some bright spark arguing that no one would ever need more than those few letters that English has. My first computing headaches were around ASCII – how do I do an /ɣ/ and what the heck was %73£ when someone typed it at the other end?

Much has happened since and I’ve moved from phonology to software translation big time but I still can’t quite decide whether we’re in a better place now or not when it comes to small languages. Those technicalities (like ASCII vs Unicode) aside, the field has indeed opened up, in particular when it comes to open source software. There’s nothing but laziness that stops a language from having at least an office suite (LibreOffice), a browser (Firefox or Opera), an email client and calendar (Thunderbird and Lightning), a media player (VLC), a wiki (MediWiki), a spellchecker, a forum package (phpBB) and blogging software (WordPress.org and .com) – satisfying a fair chunk of your average user. For the really tough there’s Linux in all its scary glory of course. Ignoring the height of the bar when it comes to actually localizing some of them, that’s not the whole story though.

At least in digitized countries, a significant chunk of our work and social lives have shifted onto various digital platforms. Desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets… you name it. Hardly a year goes by without some innovation hitting the headlines. And the tech savy (overwhelmingly the young) have become real digital nomads. Yesterday’s app is so passé today and today’s market leader mobile phone OS may be tomorrow’s digital roadkill (anyone remember Symbian?). It’s a bewildering, fluid place.

It’s a place we can’t ignore. Whether we like it or not, virtually anyone under the age of 25 has a smartphone, from rocky outcrops in the Western Ocean like Barra to the mountains of Gipuzkoa, the deserts of Arizona and the steaming hills of Papua New Guinea. Ok, maybe not Papua New Guinea yet though it wouldn’t surprise me. The more of a space we can carve out for out languages and cultures, the better because sadly the old maxim of “Use it or lose it” – or however your language puts that – is true.

So we must compete somehow, at least at some base level. But I increasingly feel that without a small but dedicated full time team, this will become harder and harder unless there’s some magic on the way that I haven’t heard about. Let me give you an example. Predictive texting goes back to the 1970s, believe it or not but not wanting to be too depressive about it, it probably did not make huge inroads into our lives before the year 2000 or so when it really took off on phones. Back then, you had those languages which your manufacturer deemed appropriate, maybe a dozen or so if you were lucky. We’re now in 2012 and I’m waiting with bated breath for the first release of Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx on Adaptxt which, after much searching, I discovered last year. Finally an open source predictive texting project open to any language. Yay! Ok, so it only works on Android… I can live with that, looking at the Android market share. It would be good if iPhones also supported 3rd party entry methods but they don’t and I’m getting to the cheesed off stage with Apple’s approach to non-billion-speaker-languages anyway.

But I digress. There we are, happily preparing the tool which will finally take Scots Gaelic and Manx out of the letter-by-letter age (Irish has had Téacs since 2008 but I’m not sure how alive the project is) when Apple starts pushing Siri (that voice recognition thing on iPhones which, by the way, only works if your accent resembles that of the Queen and or Charleton Heston). I bet my bottom dollar that before long, every major mobile phone manufacturer will be running something similar.

Here, I gnash my teeth. Predictive texting is reasonably easy to do as long as you have a framework you can feed your data into. For example a spellchecker. But it’s taken around a decade for such a framework to grow out of the cyber community. Speech recognition is a harder. A lot harder. I have no idea how long it will take for languages such as Gaelic to take that hurdle and even less so of how many of this planet’s 6,000 languages will manage to do so. And that makes it all a little frustrating.

I don’t know what the answer is, right now, I just feel it would be nice if stuff slowed down a bit. Honestly, how much technological innovation do we need in 12 months? Or rather, how many false summits can we and our languages keep pace with?

The what keys?

I’ve just been through a head-scratching exercise and before you suggest anti-dandruff shampoos, it was about access keys. Yes… or was it shortcut keys? Or a hotkey? Or a quick key? Which sums up part of the problem – there’s too damn many of them. Now the basic idea is solid – access keys are keyboard combinations which allow you to instruct your computer to carry out frequently used tasks without having to click through the menu. So far, so good. For examply, on Windows CTRL c has long been the command for copy and CTRL v for paste. Then there’s CTRL z for undo and… errr… yes, to be honest, that’s all I ever use and I use PCs a lot, more than I care to think.

I don’t know who invented the first access key but our friends the consumers-of-too-many-pizzas must have thought this was brilliant. If copy and paste access keys are good, surely there must be other useful ones… like for open, save, close, tools, help, save as, pluck a chicken, pick your nose… and soon the whole program was peppered with the damn things. Not only that one program of course … wherever it has started, it soon spread to the rest and like the thing about electric plugs, everyone used a different name and a different key combination without ever giving a thought to the end user. Was it CTRL j, ALT j, ALTGR j or ALT CTRL SHIFT j? Or ALT OPTION or hang on, that was my DoodleBug program on Windows, I’m now on a Mac in VLC. Should I use the Apple button or Fn?

I bet if you did some research, you’d find that a lot of people only ever use a minute fraction of the available access/shortcut/whatever keys. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that the smart everyday user knows less than half a dozen and that most know none at all. And certainly no one uses them to navigate 5 levels down to the Proxy Settings of their browser. Yes, there have been attempts to streamline them but that again ignored the basic question of “do we need them” or “how many do we need”? In any cases, the attempts have been as successful as moves to standardise electric plugs or convince China that the rule of law is a good thing.

So what does this have to do with localization and my headscratching? Well, unfortunately no one bother either to automate the process. Which means that when you localize software, you have to manually add them. Now if the localization process in general was smarter, then that might sort of work but remember that when localizing software, from Microsoft to LibreOffice, what you essentially get is a table with one language in one column and your translation in another. Certainly no visual context. And usually no info which tells you anything about the scope (as in, which of these appear next to each other). So you’re faced with something like this:

&Fry
Deep fr&y
Stir-&fry
Stea&m
&Boil
Sa&utee
&Oven-roast

And it’s left to you to figure it out. In the above, your guess is as good as mine whether those all appear in the same menu or in two different ones (perhaps the first 3 in a Fry menu and the last in an Other menu). Oh, and did I mention that they don’t even agree on the symbol? In some, it’s &Fry (which gives the end user the line under the Fry), in others you have to to ~Fry and… oh, you get the idea.

So to a half-baked idea, we’ve added a haphazard localization process. Great. Oh, did I mention the guidelines? The ones which say you should put lines under letters with descenders (something dropping down like gjpqy)? Which is usually fine in English with its 26 letters. But Gaelic only has 18 guys, 16 if I have to cut out letters with descenders and even less if I’m instructed not to use thin letters (like ilf). Do I look like the Brahan Seer? I won’t even start on the difficulties that arise in locating said string when you see a wrong access key on screen in testing.

I did take the time to make sure that the most visible ones don’t overlap in programs like LibreOffice and Firefox. But several layers down, to be honest, I can’t be bothered. So I had to remind myself that the nice person who filed a bug on my behalf with a list of them for some several-layers-down-menu-about-frigging-proxies that they’re not responsible for the general mess that are access keys and not to bite their head off. In the end, I did post a condensed version of my reasoning – the fact they’re mostly pointless and as a result, that I don’t have the time and manpower to fix something which the translator shouldn’t have to fix in the first place.

Honestly, don’t people ever take a step back and think?