phpman > perldoc > Locale::Maketext::TPJ13(3perl)

NAME
    Locale::Maketext::TPJ13 -- article about software localization

SYNOPSIS
      # This an article, not a module.

DESCRIPTION
    The following article by Sean M. Burke and Jordan Lachler first appeared in *The Perl Journal*
    #13 and is copyright 1999 The Perl Journal. It appears courtesy of Jon Orwant and The Perl
    Journal. This document may be distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.

Localization and Perl: gettext breaks, Maketext fixes
    by Sean M. Burke and Jordan Lachler

    This article points out cases where gettext (a common system for localizing software interfaces
    -- i.e., making them work in the user's language of choice) fails because of basic differences
    between human languages. This article then describes Maketext, a new system capable of correctly
    treating these differences.

  A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen To You
        "There are a number of languages spoken by human beings in this world."

        -- Harald Tveit Alvestrand, in RFC 1766, "Tags for the Identification of Languages"

    Imagine that your task for the day is to localize a piece of software -- and luckily for you,
    the only output the program emits is two messages, like this:

      I scanned 12 directories.

      Your query matched 10 files in 4 directories.

    So how hard could that be? You look at the code that produces the first item, and it reads:

      printf("I scanned %g directories.",
             $directory_count);

    You think about that, and realize that it doesn't even work right for English, as it can produce
    this output:

      I scanned 1 directories.

    So you rewrite it to read:

      printf("I scanned %g %s.",
             $directory_count,
             $directory_count == 1 ?
               "directory" : "directories",
      );

    ...which does the Right Thing. (In case you don't recall, "%g" is for locale-specific number
    interpolation, and "%s" is for string interpolation.)

    But you still have to localize it for all the languages you're producing this software for, so
    you pull Locale::gettext off of CPAN so you can access the "gettext" C functions you've heard
    are standard for localization tasks.

    And you write:

      printf(gettext("I scanned %g %s."),
             $dir_scan_count,
             $dir_scan_count == 1 ?
               gettext("directory") : gettext("directories"),
      );

    But you then read in the gettext manual (Drepper, Miller, and Pinard 1995) that this is not a
    good idea, since how a single word like "directory" or "directories" is translated may depend on
    context -- and this is true, since in a case language like German or Russian, you'd may need
    these words with a different case ending in the first instance (where the word is the object of
    a verb) than in the second instance, which you haven't even gotten to yet (where the word is the
    object of a preposition, "in %g directories") -- assuming these keep the same syntax when
    translated into those languages.

    So, on the advice of the gettext manual, you rewrite:

      printf( $dir_scan_count == 1 ?
               gettext("I scanned %g directory.") :
               gettext("I scanned %g directories."),
             $dir_scan_count );

    So, you email your various translators (the boss decides that the languages du jour are Chinese,
    Arabic, Russian, and Italian, so you have one translator for each), asking for translations for
    "I scanned %g directory." and "I scanned %g directories.". When they reply, you'll put that in
    the lexicons for gettext to use when it localizes your software, so that when the user is
    running under the "zh" (Chinese) locale, gettext("I scanned %g directory.") will return the
    appropriate Chinese text, with a "%g" in there where printf can then interpolate $dir_scan.

    Your Chinese translator emails right back -- he says both of these phrases translate to the same
    thing in Chinese, because, in linguistic jargon, Chinese "doesn't have number as a grammatical
    category" -- whereas English does. That is, English has grammatical rules that refer to
    "number", i.e., whether something is grammatically singular or plural; and one of these rules is
    the one that forces nouns to take a plural suffix (generally "s") when in a plural context, as
    they are when they follow a number other than "one" (including, oddly enough, "zero"). Chinese
    has no such rules, and so has just the one phrase where English has two. But, no problem, you
    can have this one Chinese phrase appear as the translation for the two English phrases in the
    "zh" gettext lexicon for your program.

    Emboldened by this, you dive into the second phrase that your software needs to output: "Your
    query matched 10 files in 4 directories.". You notice that if you want to treat phrases as
    indivisible, as the gettext manual wisely advises, you need four cases now, instead of two, to
    cover the permutations of singular and plural on the two items, $dir_count and $file_count. So
    you try this:

      printf( $file_count == 1 ?
        ( $directory_count == 1 ?
         gettext("Your query matched %g file in %g directory.") :
         gettext("Your query matched %g file in %g directories.") ) :
        ( $directory_count == 1 ?
         gettext("Your query matched %g files in %g directory.") :
         gettext("Your query matched %g files in %g directories.") ),
       $file_count, $directory_count,
      );

    (The case of "1 file in 2 [or more] directories" could, I suppose, occur in the case of
    symlinking or something of the sort.)

    It occurs to you that this is not the prettiest code you've ever written, but this seems the way
    to go. You mail off to the translators asking for translations for these four cases. The Chinese
    guy replies with the one phrase that these all translate to in Chinese, and that phrase has two
    "%g"s in it, as it should -- but there's a problem. He translates it word-for-word back: "In %g
    directories contains %g files match your query." The %g slots are in an order reverse to what
    they are in English. You wonder how you'll get gettext to handle that.

    But you put it aside for the moment, and optimistically hope that the other translators won't
    have this problem, and that their languages will be better behaved -- i.e., that they will be
    just like English.

    But the Arabic translator is the next to write back. First off, your code for "I scanned %g
    directory." or "I scanned %g directories." assumes there's only singular or plural. But, to use
    linguistic jargon again, Arabic has grammatical number, like English (but unlike Chinese), but
    it's a three-term category: singular, dual, and plural. In other words, the way you say
    "directory" depends on whether there's one directory, or *two* of them, or *more than two* of
    them. Your test of "($directory == 1)" no longer does the job. And it means that where English's
    grammatical category of number necessitates only the two permutations of the first sentence
    based on "directory [singular]" and "directories [plural]", Arabic has three -- and, worse, in
    the second sentence ("Your query matched %g file in %g directory."), where English has four,
    Arabic has nine. You sense an unwelcome, exponential trend taking shape.

    Your Italian translator emails you back and says that "I searched 0 directories" (a possible
    English output of your program) is stilted, and if you think that's fine English, that's your
    problem, but that *just will not do* in the language of Dante. He insists that where
    $directory_count is 0, your program should produce the Italian text for "I *didn't* scan *any*
    directories.". And ditto for "I didn't match any files in any directories", although he says the
    last part about "in any directories" should probably just be left off.

    You wonder how you'll get gettext to handle this; to accommodate the ways Arabic, Chinese, and
    Italian deal with numbers in just these few very simple phrases, you need to write code that
    will ask gettext for different queries depending on whether the numerical values in question are
    1, 2, more than 2, or in some cases 0, and you still haven't figured out the problem with the
    different word order in Chinese.

    Then your Russian translator calls on the phone, to *personally* tell you the bad news about how
    really unpleasant your life is about to become:

    Russian, like German or Latin, is an inflectional language; that is, nouns and adjectives have
    to take endings that depend on their case (i.e., nominative, accusative, genitive, etc...) --
    which is roughly a matter of what role they have in syntax of the sentence -- as well as on the
    grammatical gender (i.e., masculine, feminine, neuter) and number (i.e., singular or plural) of
    the noun, as well as on the declension class of the noun. But unlike with most other inflected
    languages, putting a number-phrase (like "ten" or "forty-three", or their Arabic numeral
    equivalents) in front of noun in Russian can change the case and number that noun is, and
    therefore the endings you have to put on it.

    He elaborates: In "I scanned %g directories", you'd *expect* "directories" to be in the
    accusative case (since it is the direct object in the sentence) and the plural number, except
    where $directory_count is 1, then you'd expect the singular, of course. Just like Latin or
    German. *But!* Where $directory_count % 10 is 1 ("%" for modulo, remember), assuming $directory
    count is an integer, and except where $directory_count % 100 is 11, "directories" is forced to
    become grammatically singular, which means it gets the ending for the accusative singular... You
    begin to visualize the code it'd take to test for the problem so far, *and still work for
    Chinese and Arabic and Italian*, and how many gettext items that'd take, but he keeps going...
    But where $directory_count % 10 is 2, 3, or 4 (except where $directory_count % 100 is 12, 13, or
    14), the word for "directories" is forced to be genitive singular -- which means another
    ending... The room begins to spin around you, slowly at first... But with *all other* integer
    values, since "directory" is an inanimate noun, when preceded by a number and in the nominative
    or accusative cases (as it is here, just your luck!), it does stay plural, but it is forced into
    the genitive case -- yet another ending... And you never hear him get to the part about how
    you're going to run into similar (but maybe subtly different) problems with other Slavic
    languages like Polish, because the floor comes up to meet you, and you fade into
    unconsciousness.

    The above cautionary tale relates how an attempt at localization can lead from programmer
    consternation, to program obfuscation, to a need for sedation. But careful evaluation shows that
    your choice of tools merely needed further consideration.

  The Linguistic View
        "It is more complicated than you think."

        -- The Eighth Networking Truth, from RFC 1925

    The field of Linguistics has expended a great deal of effort over the past century trying to
    find grammatical patterns which hold across languages; it's been a constant process of people
    making generalizations that should apply to all languages, only to find out that, all too often,
    these generalizations fail -- sometimes failing for just a few languages, sometimes whole
    classes of languages, and sometimes nearly every language in the world except English. Broad
    statistical trends are evident in what the "average language" is like as far as what its rules
    can look like, must look like, and cannot look like. But the "average language" is just as
    unreal a concept as the "average person" -- it runs up against the fact no language (or person)
    is, in fact, average. The wisdom of past experience leads us to believe that any given language
    can do whatever it wants, in any order, with appeal to any kind of grammatical categories wants
    -- case, number, tense, real or metaphoric characteristics of the things that words refer to,
    arbitrary or predictable classifications of words based on what endings or prefixes they can
    take, degree or means of certainty about the truth of statements expressed, and so on, ad
    infinitum.

    Mercifully, most localization tasks are a matter of finding ways to translate whole phrases,
    generally sentences, where the context is relatively set, and where the only variation in
    content is *usually* in a number being expressed -- as in the example sentences above.
    Translating specific, fully-formed sentences is, in practice, fairly foolproof -- which is good,
    because that's what's in the phrasebooks that so many tourists rely on. Now, a given phrase
    (whether in a phrasebook or in a gettext lexicon) in one language *might* have a greater or
    lesser applicability than that phrase's translation into another language -- for example,
    strictly speaking, in Arabic, the "your" in "Your query matched..." would take a different form
    depending on whether the user is male or female; so the Arabic translation "your[feminine]
    query" is applicable in fewer cases than the corresponding English phrase, which doesn't
    distinguish the user's gender. (In practice, it's not feasible to have a program know the user's
    gender, so the masculine "you" in Arabic is usually used, by default.)

    But in general, such surprises are rare when entire sentences are being translated, especially
    when the functional context is restricted to that of a computer interacting with a user either
    to convey a fact or to prompt for a piece of information. So, for purposes of localization,
    translation by phrase (generally by sentence) is both the simplest and the least problematic.

  Breaking gettext
        "It Has To Work."

        -- First Networking Truth, RFC 1925

    Consider that sentences in a tourist phrasebook are of two types: ones like "How do I get to the
    marketplace?" that don't have any blanks to fill in, and ones like "How much do these ___
    cost?", where there's one or more blanks to fill in (and these are usually linked to a list of
    words that you can put in that blank: "fish", "potatoes", "tomatoes", etc.). The ones with no
    blanks are no problem, but the fill-in-the-blank ones may not be really straightforward. If it's
    a Swahili phrasebook, for example, the authors probably didn't bother to tell you the
    complicated ways that the verb "cost" changes its inflectional prefix depending on the noun
    you're putting in the blank. The trader in the marketplace will still understand what you're
    saying if you say "how much do these potatoes cost?" with the wrong inflectional prefix on
    "cost". After all, *you* can't speak proper Swahili, *you're* just a tourist. But while tourists
    can be stupid, computers are supposed to be smart; the computer should be able to fill in the
    blank, and still have the results be grammatical.

    In other words, a phrasebook entry takes some values as parameters (the things that you fill in
    the blank or blanks), and provides a value based on these parameters, where the way you get that
    final value from the given values can, properly speaking, involve an arbitrarily complex series
    of operations. (In the case of Chinese, it'd be not at all complex, at least in cases like the
    examples at the beginning of this article; whereas in the case of Russian it'd be a rather
    complex series of operations. And in some languages, the complexity could be spread around
    differently: while the act of putting a number-expression in front of a noun phrase might not be
    complex by itself, it may change how you have to, for example, inflect a verb elsewhere in the
    sentence. This is what in syntax is called "long-distance dependencies".)

    This talk of parameters and arbitrary complexity is just another way to say that an entry in a
    phrasebook is what in a programming language would be called a "function". Just so you don't
    miss it, this is the crux of this article: *A phrase is a function; a phrasebook is a bunch of
    functions.*

    The reason that using gettext runs into walls (as in the above second-person horror story) is
    that you're trying to use a string (or worse, a choice among a bunch of strings) to do what you
    really need a function for -- which is futile. Preforming (s)printf interpolation on the strings
    which you get back from gettext does allow you to do *some* common things passably well...
    sometimes... sort of; but, to paraphrase what some people say about "csh" script programming,
    "it fools you into thinking you can use it for real things, but you can't, and you don't
    discover this until you've already spent too much time trying, and by then it's too late."

  Replacing gettext
    So, what needs to replace gettext is a system that supports lexicons of functions instead of
    lexicons of strings. An entry in a lexicon from such a system should *not* look like this:

      "J'ai trouv\xE9 %g fichiers dans %g r\xE9pertoires"

    [\xE9 is e-acute in Latin-1. Some pod renderers would scream if I used the actual character
    here. -- SB]

    but instead like this, bearing in mind that this is just a first stab:

      sub I_found_X1_files_in_X2_directories {
        my( $files, $dirs ) = @_[0,1];
        $files = sprintf("%g %s", $files,
          $files == 1 ? 'fichier' : 'fichiers');
        $dirs = sprintf("%g %s", $dirs,
          $dirs == 1 ? "r\xE9pertoire" : "r\xE9pertoires");
        return "J'ai trouv\xE9 $files dans $dirs.";
      }

    Now, there's no particularly obvious way to store anything but strings in a gettext lexicon; so
    it looks like we just have to start over and make something better, from scratch. I call my shot
    at a gettext-replacement system "Maketext", or, in CPAN terms, Locale::Maketext.

    When designing Maketext, I chose to plan its main features in terms of "buzzword compliance".
    And here are the buzzwords:

  Buzzwords: Abstraction and Encapsulation
    The complexity of the language you're trying to output a phrase in is entirely abstracted inside
    (and encapsulated within) the Maketext module for that interface. When you call:

      print $lang->maketext("You have [quant,_1,piece] of new mail.",
                           scalar(@messages));

    you don't know (and in fact can't easily find out) whether this will involve lots of figuring,
    as in Russian (if $lang is a handle to the Russian module), or relatively little, as in Chinese.
    That kind of abstraction and encapsulation may encourage other pleasant buzzwords like
    modularization and stratification, depending on what design decisions you make.

  Buzzword: Isomorphism
    "Isomorphism" means "having the same structure or form"; in discussions of program design, the
    word takes on the special, specific meaning that your implementation of a solution to a problem
    *has the same structure* as, say, an informal verbal description of the solution, or maybe of
    the problem itself. Isomorphism is, all things considered, a good thing -- it's what
    problem-solving (and solution-implementing) should look like.

    What's wrong the with gettext-using code like this...

      printf( $file_count == 1 ?
        ( $directory_count == 1 ?
         "Your query matched %g file in %g directory." :
         "Your query matched %g file in %g directories." ) :
        ( $directory_count == 1 ?
         "Your query matched %g files in %g directory." :
         "Your query matched %g files in %g directories." ),
       $file_count, $directory_count,
      );

    is first off that it's not well abstracted -- these ways of testing for grammatical number (as
    in the expressions like "foo == 1 ? singular_form : plural_form") should be abstracted to each
    language module, since how you get grammatical number is language-specific.

    But second off, it's not isomorphic -- the "solution" (i.e., the phrasebook entries) for Chinese
    maps from these four English phrases to the one Chinese phrase that fits for all of them. In
    other words, the informal solution would be "The way to say what you want in Chinese is with the
    one phrase 'For your question, in Y directories you would find X files'" -- and so the
    implemented solution should be, isomorphically, just a straightforward way to spit out that one
    phrase, with numerals properly interpolated. It shouldn't have to map from the complexity of
    other languages to the simplicity of this one.

  Buzzword: Inheritance
    There's a great deal of reuse possible for sharing of phrases between modules for related
    dialects, or for sharing of auxiliary functions between related languages. (By "auxiliary
    functions", I mean functions that don't produce phrase-text, but which, say, return an answer to
    "does this number require a plural noun after it?". Such auxiliary functions would be used in
    the internal logic of functions that actually do produce phrase-text.)

    In the case of sharing phrases, consider that you have an interface already localized for
    American English (probably by having been written with that as the native locale, but that's
    incidental). Localizing it for UK English should, in practical terms, be just a matter of
    running it past a British person with the instructions to indicate what few phrases would
    benefit from a change in spelling or possibly minor rewording. In that case, you should be able
    to put in the UK English localization module *only* those phrases that are UK-specific, and for
    all the rest, *inherit* from the American English module. (And I expect this same situation
    would apply with Brazilian and Continental Portugese, possibly with some *very* closely related
    languages like Czech and Slovak, and possibly with the slightly different "versions" of written
    Mandarin Chinese, as I hear exist in Taiwan and mainland China.)

    As to sharing of auxiliary functions, consider the problem of Russian numbers from the beginning
    of this article; obviously, you'd want to write only once the hairy code that, given a numeric
    value, would return some specification of which case and number a given quantified noun should
    use. But suppose that you discover, while localizing an interface for, say, Ukrainian (a Slavic
    language related to Russian, spoken by several million people, many of whom would be relieved to
    find that your Web site's or software's interface is available in their language), that the
    rules in Ukrainian are the same as in Russian for quantification, and probably for many other
    grammatical functions. While there may well be no phrases in common between Russian and
    Ukrainian, you could still choose to have the Ukrainian module inherit from the Russian module,
    just for the sake of inheriting all the various grammatical methods. Or, probably better
    organizationally, you could move those functions to a module called "_E_Slavic" or something,
    which Russian and Ukrainian could inherit useful functions from, but which would (presumably)
    provide no lexicon.

  Buzzword: Concision
    Okay, concision isn't a buzzword. But it should be, so I decree that as a new buzzword,
    "concision" means that simple common things should be expressible in very few lines (or maybe
    even just a few characters) of code -- call it a special case of "making simple things easy and
    hard things possible", and see also the role it played in the MIDI::Simple language, discussed
    elsewhere in this issue [TPJ#13].

    Consider our first stab at an entry in our "phrasebook of functions":

      sub I_found_X1_files_in_X2_directories {
        my( $files, $dirs ) = @_[0,1];
        $files = sprintf("%g %s", $files,
          $files == 1 ? 'fichier' : 'fichiers');
        $dirs = sprintf("%g %s", $dirs,
          $dirs == 1 ? "r\xE9pertoire" : "r\xE9pertoires");
        return "J'ai trouv\xE9 $files dans $dirs.";
      }

    You may sense that a lexicon (to use a non-committal catch-all term for a collection of things
    you know how to say, regardless of whether they're phrases or words) consisting of functions
    *expressed* as above would make for rather long-winded and repetitive code -- even if you wisely
    rewrote this to have quantification (as we call adding a number expression to a noun phrase) be
    a function called like:

      sub I_found_X1_files_in_X2_directories {
        my( $files, $dirs ) = @_[0,1];
        $files = quant($files, "fichier");
        $dirs =  quant($dirs,  "r\xE9pertoire");
        return "J'ai trouv\xE9 $files dans $dirs.";
      }

    And you may also sense that you do not want to bother your translators with having to write Perl
    code -- you'd much rather that they spend their *very costly time* on just translation. And this
    is to say nothing of the near impossibility of finding a commercial translator who would know
    even simple Perl.

    In a first-hack implementation of Maketext, each language-module's lexicon looked like this:

     %Lexicon = (
       "I found %g files in %g directories"
       => sub {
          my( $files, $dirs ) = @_[0,1];
          $files = quant($files, "fichier");
          $dirs =  quant($dirs,  "r\xE9pertoire");
          return "J'ai trouv\xE9 $files dans $dirs.";
        },
      ... and so on with other phrase => sub mappings ...
     );

    but I immediately went looking for some more concise way to basically denote the same
    phrase-function -- a way that would also serve to concisely denote *most* phrase-functions in
    the lexicon for *most* languages. After much time and even some actual thought, I decided on
    this system:

    * Where a value in a %Lexicon hash is a contentful string instead of an anonymous sub (or,
    conceivably, a coderef), it would be interpreted as a sort of shorthand expression of what the
    sub does. When accessed for the first time in a session, it is parsed, turned into Perl code,
    and then eval'd into an anonymous sub; then that sub replaces the original string in that
    lexicon. (That way, the work of parsing and evaling the shorthand form for a given phrase is
    done no more than once per session.)

    * Calls to "maketext" (as Maketext's main function is called) happen thru a "language session
    handle", notionally very much like an IO handle, in that you open one at the start of the
    session, and use it for "sending signals" to an object in order to have it return the text you
    want.

    So, this:

      $lang->maketext("You have [quant,_1,piece] of new mail.",
                     scalar(@messages));

    basically means this: look in the lexicon for $lang (which may inherit from any number of other
    lexicons), and find the function that we happen to associate with the string "You have
    [quant,_1,piece] of new mail" (which is, and should be, a functioning "shorthand" for this
    function in the native locale -- English in this case). If you find such a function, call it
    with $lang as its first parameter (as if it were a method), and then a copy of scalar(@messages)
    as its second, and then return that value. If that function was found, but was in string
    shorthand instead of being a fully specified function, parse it and make it into a function
    before calling it the first time.

    * The shorthand uses code in brackets to indicate method calls that should be performed. A full
    explanation is not in order here, but a few examples will suffice:

      "You have [quant,_1,piece] of new mail."

    The above code is shorthand for, and will be interpreted as, this:

      sub {
        my $handle = $_[0];
        my(@params) = @_;
        return join '',
          "You have ",
          $handle->quant($params[1], 'piece'),
          "of new mail.";
      }

    where "quant" is the name of a method you're using to quantify the noun "piece" with the number
    $params[0].

    A string with no brackety calls, like this:

      "Your search expression was malformed."

    is somewhat of a degenerate case, and just gets turned into:

      sub { return "Your search expression was malformed." }

    However, not everything you can write in Perl code can be written in the above shorthand system
    -- not by a long shot. For example, consider the Italian translator from the beginning of this
    article, who wanted the Italian for "I didn't find any files" as a special case, instead of "I
    found 0 files". That couldn't be specified (at least not easily or simply) in our shorthand
    system, and it would have to be written out in full, like this:

      sub {  # pretend the English strings are in Italian
        my($handle, $files, $dirs) = @_[0,1,2];
        return "I didn't find any files" unless $files;
        return join '',
          "I found ",
          $handle->quant($files, 'file'),
          " in ",
          $handle->quant($dirs,  'directory'),
          ".";
      }

    Next to a lexicon full of shorthand code, that sort of sticks out like a sore thumb -- but this
    *is* a special case, after all; and at least it's possible, if not as concise as usual.

    As to how you'd implement the Russian example from the beginning of the article, well, There's
    More Than One Way To Do It, but it could be something like this (using English words for
    Russian, just so you know what's going on):

      "I [quant,_1,directory,accusative] scanned."

    This shifts the burden of complexity off to the quant method. That method's parameters are: the
    numeric value it's going to use to quantify something; the Russian word it's going to quantify;
    and the parameter "accusative", which you're using to mean that this sentence's syntax wants a
    noun in the accusative case there, although that quantification method may have to overrule, for
    grammatical reasons you may recall from the beginning of this article.

    Now, the Russian quant method here is responsible not only for implementing the strange logic
    necessary for figuring out how Russian number-phrases impose case and number on their
    noun-phrases, but also for inflecting the Russian word for "directory". How that inflection is
    to be carried out is no small issue, and among the solutions I've seen, some (like variations on
    a simple lookup in a hash where all possible forms are provided for all necessary words) are
    straightforward but *can* become cumbersome when you need to inflect more than a few dozen
    words; and other solutions (like using algorithms to model the inflections, storing only root
    forms and irregularities) *can* involve more overhead than is justifiable for all but the
    largest lexicons.

    Mercifully, this design decision becomes crucial only in the hairiest of inflected languages, of
    which Russian is by no means the *worst* case scenario, but is worse than most. Most languages
    have simpler inflection systems; for example, in English or Swahili, there are generally no more
    than two possible inflected forms for a given noun ("error/errors"; "kosa/makosa"), and the
    rules for producing these forms are fairly simple -- or at least, simple rules can be formulated
    that work for most words, and you can then treat the exceptions as just "irregular", at least
    relative to your ad hoc rules. A simpler inflection system (simpler rules, fewer forms) means
    that design decisions are less crucial to maintaining sanity, whereas the same decisions could
    incur overhead-versus-scalability problems in languages like Russian. It may *also* be likely
    that code (possibly in Perl, as with Lingua::EN::Inflect, for English nouns) has already been
    written for the language in question, whether simple or complex.

    Moreover, a third possibility may even be simpler than anything discussed above: "Just require
    that all possible (or at least applicable) forms be provided in the call to the given language's
    quant method, as in:"

      "I found [quant,_1,file,files]."

    That way, quant just has to chose which form it needs, without having to look up or generate
    anything. While possibly not optimal for Russian, this should work well for most other
    languages, where quantification is not as complicated an operation.

  The Devil in the Details
    There's plenty more to Maketext than described above -- for example, there's the details of how
    language tags ("en-US", "i-pwn", "fi", etc.) or locale IDs ("en_US") interact with actual module
    naming ("BogoQuery/Locale/en_us.pm"), and what magic can ensue; there's the details of how to
    record (and possibly negotiate) what character encoding Maketext will return text in (UTF8?
    Latin-1? KOI8?). There's the interesting fact that Maketext is for localization, but nowhere
    actually has a ""use locale;"" anywhere in it. For the curious, there's the somewhat frightening
    details of how I actually implement something like data inheritance so that searches across
    modules' %Lexicon hashes can parallel how Perl implements method inheritance.

    And, most importantly, there's all the practical details of how to actually go about deriving
    from Maketext so you can use it for your interfaces, and the various tools and conventions for
    starting out and maintaining individual language modules.

    That is all covered in the documentation for Locale::Maketext and the modules that come with it,
    available in CPAN. After having read this article, which covers the why's of Maketext, the
    documentation, which covers the how's of it, should be quite straightforward.

  The Proof in the Pudding: Localizing Web Sites
    Maketext and gettext have a notable difference: gettext is in C, accessible thru C library
    calls, whereas Maketext is in Perl, and really can't work without a Perl interpreter (although I
    suppose something like it could be written for C). Accidents of history (and not necessarily
    lucky ones) have made C++ the most common language for the implementation of applications like
    word processors, Web browsers, and even many in-house applications like custom query systems.
    Current conditions make it somewhat unlikely that the next one of any of these kinds of
    applications will be written in Perl, albeit clearly more for reasons of custom and inertia than
    out of consideration of what is the right tool for the job.

    However, other accidents of history have made Perl a well-accepted language for design of
    server-side programs (generally in CGI form) for Web site interfaces. Localization of static
    pages in Web sites is trivial, feasible either with simple language-negotiation features in
    servers like Apache, or with some kind of server-side inclusions of language-appropriate text
    into layout templates. However, I think that the localization of Perl-based search systems (or
    other kinds of dynamic content) in Web sites, be they public or access-restricted, is where
    Maketext will see the greatest use.

    I presume that it would be only the exceptional Web site that gets localized for English *and*
    Chinese *and* Italian *and* Arabic *and* Russian, to recall the languages from the beginning of
    this article -- to say nothing of German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Finnish, and Hindi, to name
    a few languages that benefit from large numbers of programmers or Web viewers or both.

    However, the ever-increasing internationalization of the Web (whether measured in terms of
    amount of content, of numbers of content writers or programmers, or of size of content
    audiences) makes it increasingly likely that the interface to the average Web-based dynamic
    content service will be localized for two or maybe three languages. It is my hope that Maketext
    will make that task as simple as possible, and will remove previous barriers to localization for
    languages dissimilar to English.

     __END__

    Sean M. Burke (sburke AT cpan.org) has a Master's in linguistics from Northwestern University; he
    specializes in language technology. Jordan Lachler (lachler AT unm.edu) is a PhD student in the
    Department of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico; he specializes in morphology and
    pedagogy of North American native languages.

  References
    Alvestrand, Harald Tveit. 1995. *RFC 1766: Tags for the Identification of Languages.*
    "<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1766.txt>" [Now see RFC 3066.]

    Callon, Ross, editor. 1996. *RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths.*
    "<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1925.txt>"

    Drepper, Ulrich, Peter Miller, and Fran?ois Pinard. 1995-2001. GNU "gettext". Available in
    "<ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/>", with extensive docs in the distribution tarball. [Since I
    wrote this article in 1998, I now see that the gettext docs are now trying more to come to terms
    with plurality. Whether useful conclusions have come from it is another question altogether. --
    SMB, May 2001]

    Forbes, Nevill. 1964. *Russian Grammar.* Third Edition, revised by J. C. Dumbreck. Oxford
    University Press.