</karl>
=================================================================
Karl F. Best
OASIS - Director, Technical Operations
+1 978.667.5115 x206
karl.best@oasis-open.org http://www.oasis-open.org

Introduction

Pierre Cadieux, LISA Newsletter Technology Editor

printer friendly version

This technology issue has a theme: "Addresses". Just the other day, I was making a list of internationalization issues and standards: date and time are well understood and standardized as are currency display forms, though conversion, inflation, and local pricing issues can be amazingly complex. Phone numbers come in a great deal of variety and standardizing them is an exercise in frustration. Then I thought of addresses.

My first thought was again about frustration: the frustration of filling out several Web forms to order an American product, only to be blocked at the last step because the shipping address form absolutely required a valid numeric American zip code. Readers are reminded that I live in Montreal, Canada and that my postal code is "H2J 3R3".

My second thought was to investigate further and indeed, a few Web searches later, I had discovered, with a strange mixture of mild surprise and masochistic satisfaction, that addresses were yet another rich, complex and twisted internationalization issue!

You will learn, reading Graham Rhind's article, that Web sites almost never display the correct address layout for the customers they are serving! And that they inevitably will have corrupted data they need to clean up, shipping errors to correct, etc. Sounds brain-dead does it not? You will also learn that the ISO 3166 standard list of countries is incomplete for postal purposes!

The article by Tina Lieu (premium content) describes the JPOST product just released by Basis. You will learn what a Japanese address looks like; it can contain a number of fields including Postal code, Prefecture, City, Ward, District, Block, Sub-block, House, Floor, etc.

Whereas Rhind's approach would be to display a form with all required fields for a Japanese address, JPOST is designed to parse free-form input and produce a standard set of form fields as a result. Either approach will produce results immensely superior to those obtained by letting Japanese users fill in State and Zip fields.

A third address-related article by Victor Zabolotnyi tells us about the origins of country and city names and how these are translated/transliterated into other languages. He points out that the New in New York is transliterated into Russian, while the New in New Orleans is translated; I can confirm that the same holds true in French where one can go to New York or la Nouvelle Orléans. Did you know that Europe got its name from an Asian princess? or that Bolshoi simply means "big"?

Finally, Matta Saikali completes his 3-part series on testing with an article explaining how to set-up a localization test lab: how many machines are required, how many different operating systems and languages per machine, how to allocate them to minimize scheduling conflicts.

Oh! and the Tech Briefs as usual…

Rank this article