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 Are we all ready? Today we are going to talk about word ordering and word comparison or technically speaking “strings.”

 You may think that all existing ways of ordering are already known and that this process should be easy to resolve during the internationalization of an application. However, end users could have differing perspectives as to what constitutes an “ordered” list. Not only can alphabetical order vary between languages but also ordering conventions of dictionary entries and telephone book listings can be completely different from what you are used to.

 In French, for example, words that are spelled identically (except for diacritics , remember them?) are classified by a comparison of the characters from right to left instead of a comparison from left to right, as it is used in English. Asian languages, on the other hand, have diverse ordering, which will vary depending on phonetics, radical order, etc.

 Below are some examples of character ordering:

•  In Norwegian and Danish, æ comes after z; ø after æ; and å after ø.
• In Swedish and Finnish, ü is equivalent to y; w is equivalent to v; å comes after z; ä after å; and ö after ä.
• In German, æ is equivalent to ä, which comes after a; œ is equivalent to ö and comes after o; ue is equivalent to ü, which comes after u; and ? is equivalent to ss.

 See, not everything is as easy as it appears and you could easily get disordered…

In the next post we will talk about some more differences between languages. Stay tuned; there is much more to come…

“Diacritics and glyphs: What language is this?” you could be asking… As weird as it may seem, we are talking good old English.

Therefore, before proceeding with our series on internationalization, I think it’s better to explain two concepts that will be used often moving forward: glyphs and diacritics.

1. Glyphs

The term glyph is used to describe the physical appearance of a character. Computer fonts, for example, form a set of glyphs. Following are some:

Glyphs representing lower case letters ‘a’ with Zapfino font.

Block of Mayan glyphs.

Egyptian glyphs (also known as hieroglyphics).

2.    Diacritics

According to Wikipedia, a diacritic is an ancillary glyph added to a letter, or a basic glyph used, for example, to change the sound of a letter to which it was added. Among the various diacritics in the Portuguese language, there are the acute and grave accents, the cedilla, the tilde, the umlaut…hold on! They don’t have that one anymore!

Now that you have been introduced to my old friends, Glyph and Diacritic, you will see how it will be much easier now to understand the next few posts. Until then!

Despite the fact that this post is about measuring, it will be a short one. Worldwide, measurement is represented by various differing types of units and scales.

The most popular measurement system is the Metric System (liters, grams, etc.) yet most English speaking countries use the Imperial System (feet, inches, pounds, etc.), due to British colonization.

The various types of units used for measuring are:

• Length
• Weight
• Area
• Volume
• Temperature
• Paper Size
• Notation of angles, etc.

Once again, as most of the applications that we use on a daily basis are developed in the US, if certain care is not taken during Internationalization, you could have problems to express measurements correctly.

Although this one was rather short, things will start getting pretty technical in the next post. Be prepared…

Tic-tac, tic-tac… Rrrrrrrrring! Time to wake up!

If an application was not developed in a way to universally tell time and you need it to alert you of something you have scheduled, you could end up being very late. Therefore, it is very important to give your undivided attention to this important detail.

There are two points that should be considered in relation to time display:

a) Use of the 12- vs. 24-hour clock
European, Asian and Latin American countries use a 24-hour clock as opposed to the 12-hour (AM/PM) format used in the United States.

b)  Hour, minute and second separating character
Although the colon (:) is the most commonly used character to separate hours from minutes from seconds, some Asian languages prefer using ideograms. In other parts of the world, one must use a character representing the hour (h), minute (m) and second (s).

A frequent method to indicate a time zone is to use the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as a base, followed by the time zone. This can be shown as a positive or negative difference in the hour (or the minutes, when the time difference is 30 or 45 minutes). Rio de Janeiro, for example, is at GMT -03:00, while New Delhi is at GMT +05:30.

Another way of indicating time zones is to use the name of the local time zone, which is commonly done in the US. Some examples include PT (or Pacific Time) and ET (or Eastern Time). Still, some points should be taken into consideration:

• Not all countries use time zone names
• Time zone abbreviations can vary from one place to another
• Not all countries consider daylight savings, which doesn’t even start on the same day in the participating countries
• A time zone could have differing names and be translated differently depending on the country and the language

You can find interesting details (even with photos) about the real Observatory in Greenwich, at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Observatory,_Greenwich.

In the next post, we will analyze measuring units.

The translation market was featured on Repórter Brasil, a program of the TV Brasil channel, in the beginning of October. And Ccaps was there!

Production Manager Cassius spoke about the opportunities in the localization industry market and the new challenges that resulted from a heated market. You can also see some of our superstar PMs working here at the office.

The piece covered just a bit of everything — localization, sworn translations, companies, freelancers — and showed that the demand for translators in increasing exponentially. This is because Brazil is on the spot due to its economic situation and because it will host major sporting events, such as the World Cup and the Olympics.

Ccaps was feeling already an increase in its workload, which has caused our team to grow significantly in the last few years. Besides Project Managers, we have hired Janayna as our Vendor Manager. She has been coordinating with tighter control and efficiency our search for qualified freelance translators.

Speaking of which, if you are not already part of the Ccaps team, send Janayna your resume already! You can use the hr @ ccaps.net email address, but please remember that we only work with language pairs that include Portuguese or Spanish!

And do let me know what you thought of the Ccaps TV channel on YouTube, OK? We will soon be posting more videos there for you to enjoy.

See you soon!