Tag: languages

Language support in RSS readers slowly getting better?

Real right to left support in greatnews

real right to left support in greatnews rss reader. At long last the rss readers are starting to do right to left languages correctly now.

How can I tell? The position of the unread items. Yes its kind of weird, you would think things would be directly mirrored. But nope, see the issue is that the farsi text is unicode encoded right to left, while the numbers and brackets are left to right. When you put the two together like that on the same line then read it left to right. Things get a little messy.

Oh the feed in question… www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/persian/atom.xml. Which I modified from the standard Moveable type template.

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Blogosphere is more international than ever before

I've been meaning to blog this for weeks now. Dave Sifry's latest report on the state of the blogosphere. So generally the blogosphere has becaome a lot more international with english taking a step down in the most used language in the blogosphere. Its actually better that you think too, because english now count for less than 35% of the blogosphere. Theres lots of other interesting things in the report like the Chinese blogosphere growing a lot due to MSN Spaces and Chinese and Bokee.com. Dave suggests that Japanese bloggers blog small posts from there phone, hence the huge jump. In the same post but not really realted Dave talks about how Tags and Categories are used by 47% of the blogosphere now.

Talking about languages and blogs, the BBC blogs has new additions to its own blognetwork. Spanish, Arabic and Persian blogs. The Chinese and new Urdu blog are just around the corner too. I guess this is perfectly fitting with the latest report. I have yet to try out Native text (a free web service that translates RSS feeds from blogs and podcasts into foreign languages) but it certainly sounds useful. I hear the Persian Blog already has a large audience visiting it.

Chinese just launched yesterday in simplfied chinese which causes it own problems because its all in UTF-8. It seems a lot of chinese reading people set there browsers to the encoding GB2312 or Traditional BIG5

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World Service cuts run deep

I wrote a nice long piece about the worldservice language services closures and Arabic TV. But somewhere along the line it got deleted by myself. I really need to invest in some decent Blogging software because using a Bookmarklet is not good when your writing a long entry. Anyhow, I'm not going to repeat or remember the entry. Plus it was timed just after the press officially found out about the cuts, while this obvioulsy isnt. Here's the main points of the day.

  • Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Thai language services will end by March 2006
  • There will be more investment in developing New Media
  • Increased funding for global FM distribution
  • Extra marketing for the other 33 languages services
  • Modernising bureaus in priority markets
  • Further exploring of TV service partnerships within other languages and countries

And here's the front of BBC news at 1pm today.

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