Chapter 5. Characters in Each Country

50

product that is an acceptable compromise (maybe not perfect) for all Spanish speaking countries

or to produce multiple versions to account for all the regional variations.

A plea to all the people who are localizing software into Spanish: Let's use our efforts judiciously

and create one Spanish version and not many. Let's strive for a version that conforms to the Stan 

dards and that can be as widely accepted as possible for the areas not covered by the Standards.

Wouldn't you rather have a new product translated, instead of two versions of a product where

one matches your local variety of the language?

5.3 Languages with Cyrillic script

Section written by Alexander Voropay

.

First of all, there are a lot of languages with Cyrillic script.

Slavic languages : Russian (ru), Ukrainian (uk), Belarussian (be), Bulgarian (bg), Serbian (sr), and

Macedonian (mk).

Another Slavic languages (Polish(pl), Czech(cz), Croatian(hr)) uses Latin script : mainly ISO 8859 

2 (Central European).

During USSR time some non slavic languages got own alpabets, based on modifyed cyrillic char 

acters. Azerbaijani (az), Turkmen (tk), Kurdish (ku), Uzbek (uz), Kazakh (kk), Kirghiz (ky), Tajik

(tg) and Mongolian (mn) Komi (kv) e.t.c.

http://www.peoples.org.ru/eng_index.html

http://www hep.fzu.cz/~piska/

http://www.srpsko pismo.org/

http://www.hr/hrvatska/language/CroLang.html

http://ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/localization/charsets/cs encodings faq

UNICODE has rich Cyrillic section.

Ufortunately, there are a lot of 8 bit Cyrillic Charsets. There is no one universal 8 bit Cyrillic

charset, because, for example, there are about 260 Cyrillic characters in Adobe Glyph List (

http:

//partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/PDFS/TN/5013.Cyrillic_Font_Spec.pdf

).

The overview  The Cyrillic Charset Soup (

http://czyborra.com/charsets/cyrillic.html

) .

The main problem with Russian : there are at least six live Charsets:

  KOI8 R