"BABEL FISH :
The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it, It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. the practical upshot of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any language.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes like this : "I refuse to prove that I exist", says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But", says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? it could not have evolved by chance. it proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear", says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh that was easy" says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
- excerpt from the The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Well while the Babel fish continues to operate in another part of the universe (and quite possibly another moment of time), we mere mortals have to continue to face the daily challenges that modern life throws at us to make sure we stay interested.
For me today bought a new challenge of finding a service that would allow my department to publish an online survey in Arabic. Since we are a predominately English speaking department this was a great challenge and one that threw up some interesting bits of discussions.
The problem:
Generally we use Survey Monkey (Surveymonkey.com) to produce and manage our online surveys, as the service is a great web app and simple to use, however although Survey Monkey proclaims that:"We Support Any Language"
The service later reports:
"We do not provide support in creating language formats that go from right to left, like Arabic or Hebrew."
Great! not sure what that means but I will give it a go!
Internationalization
As the world becomes more connected and communication becomes a continual stream of information, this information needs to be organized and prepared in order to be effective and in technology a technique that is used is something called 'internationalization'.Survey Monkey supports this technique by providing a series of prepared messages and lists the following elements that have been 'internationalized':
- Navigation Buttons
- Add a Comment Field option
- Demographic Information question: Default labels are translated
- Text Validation error message
- Require Answer to Question error message
- Date and Time validation error message
- Collector Password Restriction feature: Prompts and default messages are translated
- Thank You Page collector feature: Default message is translated
- Popup Invitation Collector: Default buttons and message are translated
 |
| Windows OS activated language control |
Now the issue remaining is the flow of text as Arabic reads from right-to-left and for this problem I have requested assistance from a professional Arabic translator to proof the survey as I create it during a online session tomorrow.
*this post will continue in another session hopefully tomorrow if time permits
Further reading:
Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmers Guide to the Encoding Standard
Multilingual Information Retrieval: From Research To Practice
The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five
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