#Internationalisation is more than conversion of numbers

A friend read my last blogpost and pointed me to a recent presentation about the current best of breed internationalisation for JavaScript. He had been testing the new jQuery internationalisation library published by the Wikimedia Foundation and was astonished that the one thing "everybody" does was missing.

His question was: "where is the conversion of numbers and dates?". Obviously MediaWiki "does" the conversion of numbers and dates, it is just not part of the library that enables what is most crucial for us in Internationalisation; the translation of the messages in more than 280+ languages.

My friend Andrew was thinking of extending the library with the conversion of numbers and dates. It makes sense to have them included however, forking this really new library at this early time is "evilish". Talking to Santhosh, the developer of this library is the thing to do. It is, because in this way any future improvements in the existing 280+ languages or the missing 6000+ languages will be shared by anyone who updates to this library.

YES, I know jQuery is Java and not JavaScript. But I also know that my friends at the Wikimedia Foundation support the localisation of their JavaScript.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#jQuery and #Internationalisation of YOUR application

There has been a lot of good news about jQuery this week.

• The Khan academy announced that they are providing training for computer science and they started with jQuery
• A Webmonkey report states that jQuery is installed on half the internet websites
• Hidden in a Wikimedia blogpost is the news of a library to provide a full i18n framework that supports parameter replacements and grammar-, plural-, and gender-dependent translations.

The news of this jquery.i18n library is wonderful news. As it is the same software as used for the internationalisation of MediaWiki, it represents the current knowledge of the 280+ languages that have their Wikipedia.

When your software is open source and when you adopt this library to implement internationalisation, you are that much closer to make use of that wonderful community at translatewiki.net. They are already doing a great job for many applications, why not yours?

Thanks,

      GerardM