Sorting it all Out Michael Kaplan's random stuff of dubious value Be sure to read the disclaimer here first!
Earlier today, in reponse to my post [Localized] Date/Time format tokens, regular reader Serge Wautier commented:
Oddly enough, according to your screenshots, the Turkish translation seems to use the same letter (s) for hours and seconds!
Let's take a closer look:
Geez, he's right.
It gets worse if you look at all of the choices one has for date formats:
Why that is downright confusable, isn't it?
Hmmm... makes me wonder what happens if we look at the Turkish locale in Turkish (the above is looking at English (US) in Turkish):
Ok, that is a bit less confusable, isn't it? :-)
It also explains why a localizer may not notice the difference when they are reviewing what their change looks like -- how likely would they be to check other locales? And the wide range of them?
This kind of problem is a side effect of the wide range of possibilities that is hard to completely test. For another example, here is the Arabic user locale list -- note the appropriate use of parentheses:
Ok, now let's move over to the UI language list:
How do you say Oops! in Arabic again? :-)
Now the original issue with Turkish can certainly complicate string parsing, and if you try to change the order of the time parameters you will likely run into problems (luckily this is very seldom done!).
Perhaps it is a good thing that this is only a UI feature and not a programmatic one?
This post brought to you by "s" (U+0073, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER S)