Hyphenation on the web

Basically, hyphenation is the splitting of words with dashes at the end of text lines. By using it, the text displayed on the screen can by gracefully justified or lined-wrapped, and shown in a neat column.

Up to now, there were two ways to get them: either setting soft hyphens in HTML from the server side (telling the browser where it can cut words by inserting the ­ character) or using a javascript library to hyphenate your text on the client side. You can now do it directly with CSS3 styling.

Multilingual text alignment with Linguee

Multilingual text alignment consists in putting face to face two texts in different languages. By text, we mean here any equivalent unity like a paragraph, a sentence, an expression or a word. This technique is used for automatic translation and gives its best results when the corpus is wide (to cover the maximum number of use cases, as it is a statistical approach) and the vocabulary reduced. 

Advanced jQuery Form validation (3): Add conditional requirement rule for a set of checkboxes

The third article of that series about advanced jQuery Form validation deals with conditional triggers. In that particular case, we have a conditional trigger displayed as a radio button that makes a set of checkboxes required when activated, and optional when not activated.

All the checkboxes share the same name checkBoxesName[]. Note the square brackets, as we handle them with PHP on the server side, and the grouping has to be done this way.

To apply a validation rule to the set of checkboxes, the square brackets have to be used, hence the simple quotes used to delimitate their name in form validator set of rules.

Counting in Salishan languages

Spoken in southern British Columbia (Canada) and in the north of Washington, in Oregon, Idaho and Montana states in the U.S., the Salishan languages form a continuum of about thirty languages. If the situation is worrying for many of them, others are supported by their communities and are at different levels of use, education and revitalization.

Among them, we find the Comox (400 speakers), Halkomelem (200 speakers), Saanich (about twenty speakers), Squamish (about fifteen speakers) and Klallam (about ten speakers) languages.

Client experience and translation follow-up

 A translation project does not limit itself to an input text and an output translation. Even if the translation freelance offers on the web are only fighting over the price of the translated word, a real client experience needs to go further and to follow the project after its delivery.

In translation as in any other field, a satisfied client will think about us when new needs arise, or when one of their contacts ask for a good translator. Beyond that mere marketing point of view, a client is not a revenue source but a partner with whom we do business in an interdependent relationship. If they need us, we need them even more, as they can find other contractors a click away.

Advanced jQuery Form validation (2): Validate a date

After checking a phone number against its international format, we will now check if a date entered as a string is valid.

We can of course use a date picker such as jQueryUI Datepicker to ease the user experience and with a nicer look and feel, but the aim of this example is to show you some advanced jQuery Form validation so we will use a very simple example. As a matter of fact, even with the aformentioned date picker, this control is still useful as your users can enter the date manually in your text input field.

Counting in Kanak languages

Spoken in the New-Caledonia archipelago, the 28 Kanak languages belong to the Austronesian languages family. Among them, we find Nengone, Paicî and Nêlêmwa, which respectively count 9,000, 7,000 and 1,000 speakers older than 14 years.