A View from the Street

The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed 2008 to be the International Year of Languages.
UNESCO has setup several areas where language research and education can improve people’s lives, increase information sharing and so on.
Get Involved
UNESCO featured site: Freelang.com [article] forums on translation, free hints, short translations and such, free dictionaries and a clearinghouse for translators [...]

On a recent trip to Sesame Place in Pennsylvania (U.S.A.), we spotted a wall mural showing some of the local versions of the show in different countries. Notice the complete lack of “familiar” characters like Big Bird, Elmo and Zoë?
My friend related this (paraphrased) conversation he had before with friends of his from Germany [...]

For those not familiar, “aa-AA” is the syntax from ISO 639 and ISO 3166 for countries and languages, respectively. “en-GB” is English as spoken in Great Britain, “es-PA” is Spanish as spoken in Panama, “es-MX” is Spanish as spoken in Mexico, etc.
“es-US” is Spanish as spoken in the United States.
es-US is not es-MX! [...]

I bet this is a question you didn’t consider when planning localization for your data!
Not all English-speaking countries use the imperial system, and not all countries other than USA use metric. If you accept or display any measurement-related data, this is something you probably should care about.
For example:

North America (USA and Canada) is [...]

When testing applications in alternate locales, it is somewhat of a pain to install MUI on XP, turn on fast user switching, and stay logged in twice—once as me to develop, and again as another user in an alternate language. Not to mention, I can’t really navigate around XP in anything other than French [...]

Here’s a semi-quick tip on working on .NET applications that run in multiple locales: install the MS Windows Multi-lingual User Interface pack. Grab the latest MSDN batch of DVDs and pop “Windows XP MUI Pack” (or whichever you need…Server 2003, etc.). Run muisetup.exe from the directory you’re interested in, such as “E:\ENGLISH\WINXP\MUI\CD1″. [...]

Ever see this on a web site?
Select a language:
You are supposed to click the second image (Spain’s flag) if you are a Spanish speaker. What if you are in Mexico? How about if you are in the United States or Canada and happen to prefer the [...]

I’ve been on Canadian, French, Swiss, and UK/Irish keyboards, always looking for the über layout I can buy that has it all, without looking like an old-style “space cadet” keyboard from
Symbolics Lisp machine days of yore (am I dating myself here?)
Frankly, I thought that this would be a simple affair, since my requirements were [...]

Localization and translation is not the same thing, especially in application development. Translation is providing the same meaning to a sentence or phrase in another language. Localization is making a window or web page appropriate for another locale. Nearly all the time, localization (L10n for short) includes translating text [...]

Section 508 requires that Federal agencies’ electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities.

While the rules in Section 508 pertain to much more than just web and video design, I’ve highlighted below the particular regulations that can/do apply to video on the web.