Open Road

One of the sessions at the Open Road Conference this year was on Language Enablement. The presentation slides are available at http://www.openroad.net.au/conferences/2008/papers/woc.pdf.

Current language enablement work here is focusing on Harari (an Ethiopian language) and a range of Sudanese languages, including Dinka, Nuer, Bari and others.

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A Burmese localisation project for OpenOffice has been established and is under way. The Burmese OpenOffice is based on the Unicode 5.1 Myanmar block. The localisation team are looking for beta testers.

A translation project has been set up to translate OpenOffice interface into Burmese. The Burmese translation project are looking for volunteers.

Other projects that are in development or will commence in the near future include:

• A Burmese (my_MM) locale for the Common Locale Data Repository.
• A Burmese collation algorithm for ICU.
• A Burmese line breaking algorithm for ICU

All these will be based on the Unicode 5.1 Myanmar block.

Current font technologies and font rendering systems make a distinction between writing scripts that require complex rendering and those scripts that do not. In most cases Latin is treated as a non-complex script. For a range of African and South East Asian languages that use the Latin script, the Latin script needs to be treated as a complex script.

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In the aftermath of the Community Languages Online report I’ve had time to start teasing out my thoughts on web internationalisation and accessibility as it applies to government information in community languages.

Web accessibility is well entrenched in federal and state governments’ web standards in Australia. Generally web developers understand the need for web accessibility. Government departments and agencies require web accessibility and will make the effort to get their websites to comply with accessibility standards.

This seems to work smoothly in monolingual environments, but there is a fracture point. Looking at Australian government websites, it becomes apparent that key aspects of web accessibility (and its relationship with web internationalisation) is only superficially understood.

In a future post I’ll discuss two particular federal government websites. For the moment I’ll concentrate on my understanding of web accessibility as it applies to content in community languages.

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A number of changes to the Myanmar script and proposed support for additional South east Asian support are in the ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode pipelines over the next year or two.

Andrew West provides a very good summary of what will be in Unicode 5.1 in his post What’s new in Unicode 5.1 ?.

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I’ve been looking into Unicode support for the Myanmar Script. A few local projects require Unicode support for Myanmar (Burmese), Mon and S’gaw Karen. The existing Unicode Myanmar block only supports Myanmar (Burmese). Unicode 5.1 will make changes to the existing Myanmar block and add additional characters for Mon and S’gaw Karen. Proposals have been submitted to add additional characters to support other ethnic minority languages of the Myanmar Union.

The following notes attempt to summarize current status of Unicode support for the Myanmar script.

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