Friday June 25, 2004

Off to JavaOne

I am off to JavaOne next week, so probably will not update this blog often. One panel session I do not want to miss is Sun General Session, where they will discuss the open source possibility of Java. Rod Smith of IBM and Rob Gingell of Sun, who are the sender and the recipient of the controversial open letter about the Java open source. I'd also very much like to hear what Lawrence Lessig will say about Java open sourcing.

I wish I could moblog from JavaOne..., which is impossible because a) I don't have a mobile phone with a camera integrated, and b) this blog system is not capable of moblogging :(

Wednesday June 23, 2004

JavaOne 2004 is just around the corner

At JavaOne 2004, We will hold the annual BOF from the Java internationalization team. Of course I will be there. We will be presenting the new features that are introduced in the upcoming J2SE version 1.5, such as, Unicode 4.0 support including JSR 204 - supplementary character support, multilingual text rendering, Vietnamese locale support, and more!

This is a good opportunity for the people who are interested in the internationalization field, to hand us tons of homework in person ;) Your opinion matters. So come and join us! (2004-06-23 19:31:35.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Monday June 14, 2004

Picture taken for a demo

Sherman just stopped by my office and took a picture of me, which will be used in a demo for the upcoming JavaOne. Hope it looks decent at least :) (2004-06-14 11:18:34.0) Permalink Comments [3]

Thursday June 10, 2004

Lost in Technical Translation?

Recently, I had a chance to review a Japanese translation of a technical document written by my colleague (yes, I'm a Japanese). It may be because I have never done a translation to make my living, but every time I review those technical translations, I realize it very difficult to select the most proper Japanese word for a new technical terminology.

For example, we have introduced the Unicode 4.0 in J2SE 1.5 (still in beta 2), there are a lot of new terminologies such as "supplementary character" or "surrogate", and simple translations of those words are not very familiar to most of the Japanese people. So when we translate those words, we have to carefully choose (or even weave) Japanese words that represent the new words most properly.

On the other hand, we Japanese have a handy work around to import those new words, Katakana. Katakana is one of Japanese scripts, which mainly is used to loan foreign words. It's a phonogramic script, so that it can just import foreign word just by how it sounds. For example, "keyboard" is spelled (in Katakana) as "ki-bo-do" (where '-' denotes prolonged sound symbol). We do have an equivalent pure Japanese word for keyboard, but that is rarely used. We could use this work aound for those new technical terminologies, but those do not convey any meanings. That's why we should avoid this work around where possible. Since this is a technical translation, it may not be very useful unless the translated word has a meaning.

Yes, it's a tough job. We don't want to be blamed that we are the one who introduced those weird translations in the first place :) (2004-06-10 16:48:25.0) Permalink Comments [1]