IMUG Meetup: Google's International Bloopers...and How We Fixed One

Google Tech Talk (more info below) IMUG International Multilingual Users Group, Silicon Valley Meetup June 16, 2011 www.imug.org Presented by Luke Swartz and Mark Davis For another version of this talk, please see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BTawK7qH50 ABSTRACT Google has millions of users around the world...but occasionally we mess up. In this lighthearted talk, we explore some of Google's international "bloopers", and show how to avoid similar mistakes in other web applications. We also highlight how we solved a persistent blooper, namely having UI strings like "Alice has added 1 people to his circles." We now use our Plural/Gender API to allow complicated UI strings to correctly use numbers and personal gender, including in Google+. About the speakers: Mark Davis co-founded the Unicode project and has been the president of the Unicode Consortium since its incorporation in 1991. He is one of the key technical contributors to the Unicode specifications. Mark founded and was responsible for the overall architecture of International Components for Unicode (ICU), the premier Unicode software internationalization library, and architected the core of the Java internationalization classes. He also founded and is the chair of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) project, and is a co-author of BCP 47 Tags for Identifying Languages (RFC 4646 and RFC 4646), used for identifying languages in all XML and HTML documents. Since the start of 2006, Mark has been working on software internationalization at Google, focusing on effective and secure use of Unicode (especially in the index and search pipeline), the software internationalization libraries (including ICU) and stable international identifiers. Luke Swartz has a BS in Symbolic Systems and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. He served as a nuclear submariner in the US Navy, as a divisional and project manager both on a submarine (USS Ohio) and shore command (Commander of Submarines, Europe and Africa). Since 2010, he has been a Product Manager for Google's Internationalization team, where he has worked on various projects involving language in Google products and the Plural/Gender API.