Life, The Universe, and WordPress
Thanks again go to Tai for his translation of the second part of the Theme Guide series into Japanese. Great work!
Also, Simos Xenitellis has produced a Greek localization for the Giraffe theme. You’ll need the .mo file for the theme, and the .mo file for WordPress (taken from this Greek translation website and converted into a .mo file). Check it out from the Localization menu in the sidebar of this website, or visit his website for the full effect. Thanks Simos!
You may have noticed a small drop-down menu labelled ‘Localisation’ in the sidebar of this blog. It’s something I’ve been playing about with since localising the Giraffe theme and, while it doesn’t magically translate the entire blog, it does provide a viewer with a simple method to change the locale.
But what is a locale? In WordPress terms it refers to the framework around which your posts are displayed. That is, the words, phrases, dates, and times, that surround your posts. For example:
Try the live version now, if you want. You’ll need a Chinese font to display the Chinese localisation, but the others should work fine.
I’ve added a small Pinyin converter to the InScript plugin. Pinyin is a method of transliterating Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet. As Chinese is a tonal language, it is important that these tones are included in the pinyin. This is achieved through the use of accents and other marks over certain vowels.
The reason for the converter is that these accents are not easy to type, especially for people with keyboards in an accent-less language (i.e. English). It is possible to enter the characters using some form of character mapping tool, or by entering the HTML code directly, but this is not an intuitive method.
Instead, a popular technique used on many websites is to write the tone as a number. For example, zhong1guo2 would indicate that the ‘o’ in zhong needs the first tone applied, and ‘o’ in guo needs the second. While this is an easy method of entering the text, it does not look good, and is another layer to understanding the tones themselves.
A recent escapade in hard drive recovery made me realise that I wasn’t doing anywhere near enough to keep my system safe. Forget all about viruses and spyware and all the other computer-based threats; if your hard drive goes kaput then you are seriously screwed.
I looked into various backup software programs, but they all required me to spend considerable time burning DVDs. The best backup routine is one I don’t need to think about. My attention then moved on to a secondary, and larger, hard drive that could be used to make an exact copy of my primary drive. No hassle, no fuss, and painless recovery should anything go wrong. That’s the theory.
As I have a laptop my only option was to make this drive external. Most hard drive manufacturers make their own external drives, but they tend to be pricey. If you’re prepared to handle a few screws and bits of cable then you can get an identical device for a lot less money by purchasing a hard drive and hard drive casing, and putting it together yourself.
I’ve been trying to learn Chinese for over half a year now and, well, it’s kinda tough going. Not only do you need to learn a whole new way of speaking, but you also need to learn two written languages: pinyin (the English transliteration of Chinese words, so you can actually read anything), and Chinese characters themselves.
The spoken language is difficult in its own right due to tones. These are like the accents found in other languages, but more complicated and unfortunately much more important – getting the wrong tone in a word can change the meaning completely, to the extent that you could call your mother a horse by using the wrong inflection.
This is further complicated by different dialects. The majority of people in China speak Mandarin, while people in the South (and most of the Hong Kong expatriates around the world) speak Cantonese. They both use the same characters, but they are pronounced very differently. Actually, that’s not entirely true – Mandarin speakers use ‘simplified Chinese characters’, while Hong Kong and Taiwan use ‘traditional characters’. Sometimes they look similar, sometimes not.
Did I mention the other half-dozen regional variations? It’s enough to cause you to weep.
A big thanks to Stefano Aglietti and Mario Núñez Molina for providing localizations of the Giraffe theme in Italian and Spanish. I’ve added a small localization selector in the sidebar so that people can change the theme language and see what it looks like. It doesn’t translate the posts, but it provides dates and other phrases in the chosen language, making for a better experience for non-English speakers.
My Giraffe theme has now been updated. I’ve made some pretty major changes and these are summarised below:
Hopefully I’ve tracked down any problems already.