Singularity on the Plane

The more our information society progresses, the more we realize the value of having a program available in different languages. The effort towards internationalization and localization is an amusing trend for me, because at childhood I once thought that the existence of multiple languages is a bother, and envisioned that at some age the human civilization will settle on one ultimate lingua-gaea.

I couldn’t be more wrong. Now I realize that each language is beautiful and unique in its own right and every effort must be spent to conserve them, or at least document them sufficiently before its last speaker dies.

Anyway, multilingual programs… People might need a certain language simply because she couldn’t understand any other languages. In this case, the availability of a program in a certain language is crucial to reduce the technological gap. People might also want a certain language simply because she enjoys that particular language the most. Another use is for studying foreign languages, like me who tries to set every possible program to Japanese in order to immerse myself in the language.

With that in mind, we will investigate how Windows programs currently handle the user’s desire to choose her preferred language. (Some of the discussion might apply to other OSes such as GNU/Linux and OS X)

One installer to rule them all

The most convenient case is when a program installer includes all available translations. Examples are Inkscape, Pidgin, Battle for Wesnoth, Paint.NET, and iTunes. For example, when I tried to download the newest Inkscape, there’s only one installer for Windows: Inkscape-0.46.win32.exe. It has English, Japanese, and a myriad of other languages included. Even Indonesian!

The next question is, what language will such programs use by default? Some programs, most notably GTK programs, are smart enough to detect the operating system’s language settings. Where is it set?

In Windows XP, the user can set what language she prefers from “Control Panel” → “Regional and Language Options” → “Advanced” → “Language for non-Unicode programs”, like so:

Note that this setting is actually to enable non-Unicode (e.g., ancient) programs to display its text correctly instead of mojibake. However modern Unicode-aware programs use the value we set here to decide what language it should present to the user.

Mine is set to Japanese, so Inkscape appears like this:

Other programs ask for what language the user would like to use, perhaps at install time or when the program is run for the first time. An example is Paint.NET:

The rest just set the default language to English or whatever else the developer prefers. If the user desires, she can change the language through some means because the language data are already installed anyway. An example is an old version of OpenTTD which defaults to English:

If the default language doesn’t suit you, how do you change it? Some programs offer the convenience of setting it within the program itself. An example is iTunes:

And The Battle for Wesnoth:

GTK programs does not visibly offer any such options, because it assumes that you will in most cases want the language you set on the operating system. However, it atually checks for the availability of the LANG environment variable (probably ISO 639-1 codes). You can use it to quickly try out a language. For example, go to the command prompt and type:

set LANG=th

And from the same command prompt, run the program, say inkscape.exe:

Ah, I feel nostalgic :).

Exceptionally Easy to Extend (E3)

Some programs come with only one language, and to choose another we must download the required language files. Though quite inconvenient, it is not that bad because language files shouldn’t be that large. An example is µTorrent:

Predestination, believe it or not

Other programs offer seperate installer for each language. If you go to their web sites, you will find one installer for the English version, another for the French version, and so on. The concept is very simple: what you download is what you get. Needless to say, it’s a pain the arse for the curious or the language learners out there. Two glaring examples are OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox. Here’s a Japanese version of Firefox that I recently installed:

It’s of course better than no multilingual support at all, but still it’s a waste of bandwidth to download another version and troublesome to actually install it (uninstall the other-language version first).

My take

A modern program should at all cost include all available translations in its installer. It should then detect and display the user’s preferred language by default.

About language-changing facility, I can understand GTK’s decision to hide it from the program’s preferences. They are probably following Gnome’s guideline that every GTK app should look the same (think about themes), and if the user wants to change anything, she can apply a system-wide change. To take things into perspective, it’s bizzare to imagine that every GTK app has its own theme settings, right? At least you can set it per program using an environment variable.

For µTorrent that separates its language pack, I think it’s an acceptable special case because µTorrent aims to be a small no-frills downloadable program. Heck, even the language pack is larger than the core English program itself! However, I think for most other programs the size of the language files shouldn’t matter that much.

So big cheers for GTK apps and other programs that include all translations by default. A big, big boo for OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and the gangs that require a different download for each language.

Tags: Computer, English, Internationalization, Japanese, Language, Linux, Localization, Operating System, Software, Translation, Windows

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 12:44 am by Agro Rachmatullah and is filed under Computer, Hardware & Software, Japanese, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.