Loneliness of the long-distance linguist.

Once upon a time, a customer got in touch with us about a font rendering problem, where instead of seeing the characters he expected to see inside his applications, he saw question marks. - What’s your system locale? we asked. - I’m in Cleveland...

Okay so no, when we say transliteration, we don’t mean translation. But they do have some things in common. Understanding the difference between language and writing system – which naturally everyone does now, having read the previous blog post...

Two of the first services out of the gate for ELS are language detection and script detection, both of which are available in the PDC build of Windows 7. Both of these are already being used by different components in different ways and I thought it might...

Can't we all just get along? One of the struggles that we go through every release is in figuring out how to handle updates to the behavior of linguistic sorting. People rely on NLS APIs to sort strings appropriately for display to users. That means...

Now that you've been able to go check out our PDC talk (online here ), I'm excited to introduce you and this blog to ELS, our next big set of globalization support for developers! From our PDC Developer Guide: Extended Linguistic Services (ELS) is...

If you're at the PDC this week, be sure to check out Yaniv Feinberg and Erik Fortune's talk, where they will introduce you to many of our new globalization features for developers in Windows 7. After their talk tomorrow (1:45pm-3pm Pacific Time), I'll...

Hello world! It's been a while, but I'm coming out of hibernation to mention a couple of things -- We've been working super hard on a bunch of new things and we're getting excited to show you some of what we've been doing at the PDC this October...

And now, some shameless advertising! Our team is looking for a good tester to work on our next set of projects. We have some pretty cool stuff in the works for the next generation of globalization support in Windows and .NET, including more comprehensive...

For various reasons I've been doing statistical analyses on word frequencies in a number of languages lately, and I found a pattern that differentiates different dialects of Spanish that struck me as curious enough that I asked Gerardo, my test lead from...

The last several months have been packed with planning our next set of features in the international space -- talking to customers about what they need and what they want, looking at the teams we have and seeing where our skills are up to the challenges...

Just in time for the Vista street date, the Vista International Support Portal is live at www.microsoft.com/globaldev/vista/vistahome.mspx ! It contains lots of information about the locales, language packs, LIPs, fonts, and keyboards that we ship, and...

The moment I published my ranty LSA blog part one I was given something else to chew on. I left my laptop and went to Mark Liberman's plenary talk on the future of linguistics. Now when Mark gives a talk on the future of linguistics, chances are that...

Many years ago Bill Labov wrote an article called How I got into linguistics, and what I got out of it. It describes his path from college, through failed writing jobs and a stint as an inkmaker, up to his eventual discovery of the field of linguistics...

If you work for Microsoft or maybe in the software industry more generally and you hear someone described as being "good at process," you'll understand that what this really ends up meaning most of the time is more like "good at applying procedure," or...

What's a LOCALE_SDECIMAL among friends? In Verizon Doesn't Know Difference Between Dollars And Cents , one customer learns the hard way. If you haven't listened to this transcript yet, it's worth it.

Yes, it's been a while. Since I've last blogged, we've shipped Vista and I've gone on a long vacation to Hawaii. Personally I find both of these things very exciting. It's understandable if you care more about the first than the second. :) But I'm...

A few days ago, in Oh, the enumeration! , I wrote about some changes to the enumeration of our Spanish Traditional sort locale that would be new for Vista. What I wrote is that callers to EnumSystemLocales would have to pass the LCID_ALTERNATE_SORTS flag...

Today someone asked me whether there is anywhere on the internet that customers can find the Vista locale list. Several of us have blogged about custom locales and the ways in which customers might use them, but I wanted to post the full list of built...

Note (10/3/06): This post contains outdated content. For the correction, please see the update in Oh, the enumeration? Part two. If you use EnumSystemLocales(), one thing you may have noticed in Vista is that the Spanish Traditional sort locale (040a...

Back in the day, in a post entitled What's in a name? , I blogged about some changes to NLS identifiers that we made in order to better meet the expectations of customers accustomed to the IETF standard. In that post, I wrote: One thing to keep...

I saw a really cool talk the other day by doctoral student Daniel Avrahami from CMU. Daniel is looking at correlations between properties of IM conversations (e.g. length of message, duration of conversation, time between messages sent, etc.) and the...

Though languages can be interestingly different from one another, the majority of work in modern linguistics has been dedicated to showing that the differences are only cosmetic; at heart, all languages are expressively equivalent. I know this is true...

I have been on vacation running this crazy relay race: http://www.hoodtocoast.com But now I am back, enhobbled and all, and it's time to reach into the mail bag to answer one of the most popular questions I've received from readers: What is the...

So you want to develop a globalized application for Windows. You're up to speed on development best practices, you're going to be using Unicode, you know how to use Windows APIs and locale data to enhance the user experience you create. So how do you...

Shawn and I are working on an article for MSDN Magazine about how to design and take advantage of custom locales. We're trying to supplement the information already available in MSDN and on our blogs with some best practices that ought to help developers...