[Koha] Help from people experienced in Arabic, Hebrew, and CJK languages (and Vietnamese)

[David Cook]

I would also add that we need feedback from Vietnamese users.

I admit that I'm not very familiar with Vietnamese, but I know it's a tonal language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet#Tone_marks) which relies on a lot of diacritics with a Latin-based alphabet, so removing those tone marks could perhaps be highly problematic for Vietnamese users.  According to http://translate.koha-community.org/, the Vietnamese translation is 67% complete, so I suspect there are Vietnamese users of Koha out there. I just noticed Dung Hoang's email address in the listserv archives, so including him here for his input.

I wonder if the Romanization of CJK languages would be a thing we'd need to consider as well... we don't support any CJK libraries, so I'm not sure how those libraries store their data... whether its as ideograms or in romanized text...

I'm curious about Danish and other Scandinavian languages as well, as å may be equivalent to "aa" but not "a", I think?

--

More importantly, I agree with Galen. Do patrons expect to enter diacritics when entering their usernames? 

As Galen pointed out on Bugzilla, the original unaccenting of usernames started with http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=7411. 

Sophie: Do you recall how a userid with diacritics could cause login failures?


David Cook
Systems Librarian
Prosentient Systems
72/330 Wattle St, Ultimo, NSW 2007

> -----Original Message-----
> Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2015 10:35:19 -0500
> From: Galen Charlton <gmc at esilibrary.com>
> To: koha <koha at lists.katipo.co.nz>
> Subject: Re: [Koha] Help from people experienced in Arabic, Hebrew,
> 	and CJK languages
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAPLnt67RQ1L1dERD5zO-
> NMc77yTDfPgEBYqE5tYU8A1LdhjxmA at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 6:01 AM, Tajoli Zeno <z.tajoli at cineca.it> wrote:
> > The link:
> > http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=14759
> >
> >
> > Please try to join the discussion also if you don't know perl, but if
> > you know well one of those:
> > -  Arabic alphabet and language
> > -  Hebrew alphabet and language
> > -  CJK writing systems and languages
> 
> In addition, it would be great to have input from Koha users using
> *any* language that contains diacritics, as there is a functionality question
> underlying the discussion.
> 
> At the moment, the module in question is used to remove diacritics when
> automatically generating a public catalog username -- e.g., if a patron whose
> surname is Müller is registered with a Koha database, would they expect,
> based on their use of other websites, that their username could include the
> diacritic (e.g., "müller")? Or would they expect that it would never include
> the diacritics (e.g., "muller")?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Galen
> --
> Galen Charlton
> Infrastructure and Added Services Manager Equinox Software, Inc. / The
> Open Source Experts
> email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
> direct: +1 770-709-5581
> cell:   +1 404-984-4366
> skype:  gmcharlt
> web:    http://www.esilibrary.com/
> Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org &
> http://evergreen-ils.org
>