MULTILINGUAL HARRY.

Lifechanges … Delayed has a great list of 50 foreign titles of the first Harry Potter book; I’m happy to say that my new work iMac with OSX renders everything except the Georgian. There’s an amazing range of languages, even Plattdeutsch (Harry Potter un de Wunnersteen). Enjoy (and test your browser).

Comments

  1. OS X has to be the ultimate OS for multi-lingual types

  2. Plenty of mistakes in that list.
    The Bulgarian title contains a letter absent from the Bulgarian alphabet.
    The Hebrew title is of the second HP book, not the first.
    The Ukrainian title is wrong, it uses the wrong conjunction.
    And so on, there’re probably as many or more mistakes in languages I don’t know.

  3. Don’t you just love it? I’m happy to be running YellowDog Linux on my iBook, but for doing stuff in out-of-the-mainstream languages, OS X is the best.

  4. Oh, and strangely enough, Mozilla under YDL can do everything but the Asian languages—Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai. Georgian shows up, though.

  5. My Redhat box rendered everything.
    However, the Hebrew and Greek fonts are listing rather drunkenly, and the vowel diacritics in Thai aren’t correctly placed over their base consonant characters. (This is a Mozilla/Linux problem, I believe — it also happens with Devanagari. I believe it has to do with combining characters.)
    Still, all the languages are legible.
    Linux rah!!!

  6. Mozilla under Windows 2000 renders every single title just fine for me, so as much I like OS X, I must say that it isn’t really that special when it comes to foreign language support. The secret with Windows 2000/XP is to remember to request support for all the listed languages during installation.

  7. OS X will render the Georgian, too, it just needs a bigger Unicode font. Search for the Arial Unicode MS font, ARIALUNI.TTF, or go here for it: http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/sf/v/vietunicode/ where it is named arialuni.zip. Lucida Grande will handle nine-tenths of scripts on the Internet, but if you go to the Character Palette (which you can turn on in the International preference pane) choose View: Unicode at the top, and then choose Georgian from the menu, you’ll see in the Collections pane at the bottom (which shows under the Font Variation drop-triangle) that nothing has that character set built-in. I’ve got a crapload of Unicode fonts installed, and Arial Unicode MS is the only one I have which does include Georgian. It does not, however, have everything; Lucida Grande and Arial Unicode MS complement each other well. Gentium is another good one.
    Abiola, not to start a religious war or anything, but how do all those pretty scripts look outside your browser?

  8. Grant beat me to the OS X answer, though really this shouldn’t be a platform issue. The page is in UTF-8, which is a Unicode encoding, and any browser with Unicode support and a full-enough Unicode font should have no problem with it.
    Unicode is great for these kind of multilingual pages. Without Unicode, each line would have to specify a language-specific font and encoding.

  9. Opera 6.11 Linux gets everything right, including Georgian, if it’s told to use UTF-8 (it’s not very bright).

  10. Thanks for the corrections. I’ve fixed the Hebrew and Bulgarian titles (part of the problem is trying to trascribe from the sometimes hard-to-distinguish fonts used on the book covers). The Ukranian title, however is what pops up when checking Ukranian Potter sites, so I’m not sure what’s wrong with та in this case.

  11. The Ukrainian title is
    “Гаррі Поттер і філософський камінь”
    Since i and та are more or less interchangable in that position as conjunctions for “and”, there’re some examples of the title appearing with ta. But if you search it as a phrase on Google, you’ll find that the version with i is both more common and the only version on sites of bookshops, publishers etc.

  12. I wonder whether the Latin translator(s) considered the title De Henrico Figulo….

  13. Thanks Anatoly, the Ukranian is now fixed, too.
    Anton: Not according to this interview in the Telegraph with the translator.

  14. Incidentally, I ran across a fairly useful set of Unicode test pages you can run through your browser:
    a short test
    and the whole thing

  15. Michael Evgi says

    Hello there,
    I’m an Israeli, who just got an iMac…I’ve tried for a while to get my computer to recognize Hebrew as well, but with no luck.
    Could you please help me to find where I could dowmload it from?
    Thanks for your time,
    Michael

  16. Can anybody out there help Michael? ‘Cause I can’t.

  17. I just want to announce that my brand-new Gateway laptop can read the Georgian as well (running Firefox). W00t!

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