For years, Meetup has been available in 6 different languages. These are:
And while these languages all have their own nuances and challenges when it comes to localizing for them, it was poor preparation for some of the issues we would run into when localizing for our next supported language...
Yes, that is right, Meetup is now available in itâs 7th supported language, Japanese! It is our first supported language with a non-latin-based alphabet.
We have run into many issues because of this, but the most interesting presented itself when it came time to implement alphabetical sorting.
On first glance, alphabetically sorting a list of strings seems like a trivial task.
>>> Ordering .natural() .sortedCopy(["eagle","cat","dog","bird","falcon","duck"]) [bird, cat, dog, duck, eagle, falcon]
However many things can actually complicate this, such as capitalized letters:
>>> Ordering .natural() .sortedCopy(["eagle","cat","dog","bird","falcon","duck","Dog"]) [Dog, bird, cat, dog, duck, eagle, falcon]
A user would expect Dog and dog to be sorted next to each other. However, because these strings are sorted by character code, this is not the case.
To do a more language-friendly sort, you can use something called a collator.
>>> Ordering .from(Collator.getInstance(Locale.US)) .sortedCopy(["eagle","cat","dog","bird","falcon","duck","Dog"]) [bird, cat, dog, Dog, duck, eagle, falcon]
This performs the sorting based on rules from the American English locale. So how about Japanese?
The first thing to note is that there are multiple alphabets in play here:
Kanji: Thousands of symbols borrowed from Chinese and that can form words. Ex: æ±äșŹ - æ± means East and äșŹ means Capital city, so thatâs Tokyo).
Hiragana: Phonetic script (46 characters), for words that can not be described with Kanji, or to make the pronunciation of a word using kanji transparent. Each character corresponds to a sound, like ma, ka, saâŠ. Ex.: ăšăăăă (To-ky-o)
Katakana: Same as Hiragana (48 characters) but to represent the pronunciation of foreign words. Ex.: ăăŻăăă«ă (ma-ku-do-na-ru-do, which is how the Japanese would pronounce McDonalds)
Romaji: Latin characters, used to make the pronunciation of Japanese words transparent for those who canât read the Japanese alphabets (ex: TĆkyĆ), or used to look trendy, foreign, in some cases.
Strings in Japanese can be made up of characters in any of these alphabets, and using âdumbâ sorting, these alphabets wouldnât sort together at all. However you can use a collator based on the Japanese locale, and that gets you pretty far already.
ăăŻăăăžăŒ (Tech)
Once sorted with the collator, it becomes:
ăăŻăăăžăŒ (Tech)
x = [uâć„ćș·â, uâăăłăčâ, uâăăŻăăăžăŒâ, uâ柶æâ, uâăČăŒă â] >>> Ordering .from(Collator.getInstance(Locale.JAPAN)) .sortedCopy(x) [ăČăŒă , ăăłăč, ăăŻăăăžăŒ, 柶æ, ć„ćș·]
This will sort words starting with Katakana and Hiragana correctly, but will always put the words starting with a Kanji at the bottom of the list. Why? Because a computer does not know how a Kanji is pronounced, and ordering in Japanese is based on pronunciation, following the strict GojĆ«on (literally, âfifty soundsâ) ordering table for kana alphabets. First should come the words starting with the sound a then with i, u, e, ka, ki, ku, etc.). With Kanji, the characters used do not each correspond to the same sound every time. The pronunciation changes depending on context, and currently computers can not guess that.
Ex.: ä»æ„ can be read as ăăă (kyĆ) or ăăă«ăĄ (konnichi).
Given a large list of arbitrary kanji strings, we would be unable to sort them correctly without human intervention giving us an indication of how itâs pronounced in its context. But luckily for us, we donât have a large list of arbitrary strings! We have a relatively small list of static, already known strings. So we did in fact have a solution.
The thing we needed to sort was the list of categories that Meetup Groups can belong to. We just needed the phonetic spellings of our categories which had Kanji-based names, as we learned earlier that any Kanji-based name can be converted into a more transparent phonetic version.
We asked our translators to help provide these, and then created a new locale called âJapanese Phonetic' (ja-x-phonetic) and a new translation file containing these phonetic translations. And then, when ordering the list on the backend, we temporarily translated the categories into ja-x-phonetic, sorted them using a Japanese collator, and then re-translated them back into normal Japanese while maintaining the same order. Et VoilĂ !
So we solved our problem, but this is an issue which continues to exist for things like user generated content. If we had a large list of member names in Kanji that we wanted to sort, this would be impossible to do without either transliterating each of these ourselves (not scalable), or prompting users to provide phonetic spellings of their names in addition to the Kanji one (more scalable).
This issue came up unexpectedly, but taught us a good lesson about not making any assumptions when dealing with language. If you want to develop a global product, you have to deal with your product in a global way, and that means building things that make sense in ALL languages.
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