As a part of a project for my Desktop Publishing class, I set my sights on dubbing a portion of a 1987 crosstalk performance by Ma Sanli and Wang Fengshan. Crosstalk (相聲/相声/xiàngsheng) is a Chinese comedic tradition in which two people perform a dialogue, in a way that is something in between standup and Abbot and Costello. Of course, it’s not the sort of thing that you’d generally expect to be dubbed; it’s barely suited to translation, and if you must translate it, subtitles are objectively a better option. But still, there’s nothing like a good challenge! Read more

Around two weeks ago, I had the privilege of seeing Ken Lunde give a presentation on Ten Mincho, a new Japanese font from Adobe. One part of the presentation — talking about the font’s ability to maintain differences between base characters and CJK Compatibility Ideographs — seemed a little beyond a few people, including myself.

So, over the past week I dove into research to understand it, and I thought it might be nice to share with everyone what I learned about a little thing called Han Unification and one of Ten Mincho’s best features. Read more

What’s it for?

Much of the Internet is in English, and many American web developers rarely have cause to think beyond languages like French or Spanish when it comes to internationalization. From a development perspective, such languages function more or less like English does, and so the general structure of the webpages tends to assume a layout based on your average book or magazine, with its left to right procession of text down the page. There’s a problem there, however, and it is that other languages with other writing systems exist, and the Internet isn’t just for English speakers. If you absolutely must have an financial reason for making websites work for non-left-to-right scripts, know that Arabic speakers account for no small portion of Internet users; the kind of audience you wouldn’t want to just pass over. However, making websites more flexible is important on principle alone. If knowledge of left-to-right scripts is a requirement for using the Internet, then it can never live up to its popular image as a great equalizer. Read more