Simon Willison’s Weblog

He/She/They: Grammar and Facebook. Facebook are going to start requiring gender information because foreign language translations wind up being too confusing when that information is not available. Aside: I wish they’d implement proper title elements on their blog posts. 27th June 2008, 9:06 am

django-rosetta—Google Code. Very classy Django-powered interface for both reading and writing your project’s gettext catalog files, hence allowing application translators to work through a web interface. 11th April 2008, 7:31 am

Thai personal names (via) “Family names were allocated to families systematically and the use of family names is still controlled by the government. Any two people in Thailand with the same family name are related.” 8th December 2007, 4:26 pm

JavaScript Internationalisation, explained by reindeer. “Santa even spooked Comet recently by talking about him as if he were some pushy web server.” 8th December 2007, 2:04 pm

Django security fix released. Django’s internationalisation system has a denial of service hole in it; you’re vulnerable if you are using the i18n middleware. Fixes have been made available for trunk, 0.96, 0.95 and 0.91. 26th October 2007, 9:47 pm

BabelDjango. Tools for integrating Christopher Lenz’s Babel i18n framework with Django. 20th August 2007, 2:59 pm

Announcing Babel. Impressive new Python i18n / l10n package, with improved message extraction and a huge amount of bundled locale data. 20th July 2007, 12:20 pm

Personal names around the world. I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable about firstname/lastname fields in forms. Now I know why. 19th July 2007, 12:54 pm

Google Translate (beta). Google’s beta translator based on statistical analysis of things like the United Nations corpus. I have no idea how long this has been available; it isn’t linked from their homepage. 3rd July 2007, 4:43 pm