If you’ve been searching for Japanese documentation for J2SE 5.0, it’s finally
available on java.sun.com. Translating over 10,000 web pages is
a huge effort, even with the use of translation memory and other fancy
technology – in the end, it’s still humans who have to understand deeply
technical material in one language and render it into another without
losing critical information. It’s quite amazing that the localization
team got it all done in just two months after we shipped the English
version. As an extra goody, we also pushed out a Japanese
version of the Java Internationalization FAQ – the FAQ is not part
of the J2SE documentation bundle anymore, but it used to be, and so
I managed to convince the localization team that it should remain available
in Japanese.
Searching all this new content unfortunately is still a problem. The
engineers supporting the search functionality on the Sun developer sites
have recently done quite a bit of work to enable searching for non-English
content, such as consistently using UTF-8 for the search string and the
results pages. You can now, for example, search for “增补字符”
and find the Chinese version of an article about supplementary character
support. However, searching for “国際化”
does not find the Japanese
internationalization pages or anything else. That’s because a long
time ago, when the search functionality didn’t work for anything other
than English, the Japanese J2SE documentation was excluded from the index,
and some folks at Sun are concerned that users who don’t understand Japanese
would be offended if the search engine suddenly returned lots of Japanese
pages. The obvious solution is to look at the browser settings and return
only pages that the user can actually read, but that’s not implemented
yet. So, for the time being, if you want to find non-English content
on java.sun.com, you’re still better off using Google.
What about other languages? Well, Sun management has noticed that there
are many enthusiastic Java developers in China, and that Java documentation
in Chinese is now the most
requested RFE in our bug database. They also noticed (again) that
translating our entire documentation is a huge effort, so it’s not clear
yet if and when this can happen. In the meantime, Sun China has set up
a vibrant
developer web site, and Java
Studio Creator is moving ahead with both Chinese
localization of the tool and a Chinese
version of its developer program. Sun Korea has created a Korean
Java site as well, and Sun Japan has had a Japanese
one for a long time. For European developers, the assumption has
so far been that they usually know English well enough to get by, but
as Sun reaches out to larger numbers of developers, this assumption is
being rethought as well.
feed