IMUG Presents: Demystifying Bidi: Bidirectional Languages in Software and Web Apps

Google Tech Talk (more below) February 17, 2011 Presented by Roozbeh Pournader. Recorded at the February 2011 meeting of IMUG - The Original Multilingual Computing User Group, San Jose, CA, USA. ABSTRACT Enabling software and web apps for people who write in bidirectional languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu presents many challenges. Not only must we support mixed writing directions, but "bidi" locales in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia have additional requirements like localized numbers and alternative calendars. This talk will address common problems of bidirectionalization, current approaches taken by the industry, and suggestions for avoiding headaches, plus some examples of bidirectionalization for web apps. We will also discuss bidi localization engineering, a cost-saving step in the localization process. Roozbeh Pournader is an internationalization expert at HighTech Passport, a company specializing in localization and internationalization services. Roozbeh has been working on software bidirectionalization for his whole professional life, since 1996. As a native speaker of Persian, Roozbeh has had ample opportunity to experience the challenges of bidirectionalization firsthand. He is an author of multiple standards and technical reports for Persian support in software for Iran and Afghanistan, and a contributor to the Unicode Standard. Roozbeh contributes to various free software projects and is an advocate of open source software development. He represents the GNOME Foundation in the Unicode Consortium.