Simon Willison’s Weblog

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. People’s names are complicated. I’m not at all comfortable with the commonly used first name / last name distinction (as baked in to Django auth) since it doesn’t take cultural factors in to account.

# 17th June 2010, 7:44 pm / django, i18n, internationalisation, l10n, localisation, names, recovered

Language Detection: A Witch’s Brew? The Flickr team make the case for using the Accept-Language header over IP detection to pick a site’s language, with a simple UI for switching languages in case you get it wrong. They’ve been using this for two and a half years without any significant problems.

# 5th December 2009, 5:30 pm / languagdetection, flickr, language, i18n, l10n, http

He/She/They: Grammar and Facebook. Facebook are going to start requiring gender information because foreign language translations wind up being too confusing when that information is not available. Aside: I wish they’d implement proper title elements on their blog posts.

# 27th June 2008, 9:06 am / i18n, grammar, gender, facebook, l10n, usability

Thai personal names (via) “Family names were allocated to families systematically and the use of family names is still controlled by the government. Any two people in Thailand with the same family name are related.”

# 8th December 2007, 4:26 pm / thailand, i18n, l10n, tim-bray, james-clark

Announcing Babel. Impressive new Python i18n / l10n package, with improved message extraction and a huge amount of bundled locale data.

# 20th July 2007, 12:20 pm / babel, christopher-lenz, python, i18n, internationalisation, l10n, localisation, locale, unicode, cldr