trunk/intro-i18n/spanish.sgml


<sect id="spanish"><heading>Spanish language / used in Spain, 
most of America and Equatorial Guinea</heading>


<P>
Section written by 
Eusebio C Rufian-Zilbermann <email>eusebio@acm.org</email>.
</P>

<P>
Spanish is one of the official languages in Spain, 
the official language in most of the countries in the American 
continent and the official language in Equatorial Guinea. 
It is spoken in many other regions where it is not the 
official language. Other official languages in Spain are 
Galician, Catalan and Basque. These other languages each 
have their own specific issues with regards to Localization. 
They are not described in this section of the document.
</P>

<P>
The Spanish Language derives from the variation spoken in 
the Castille region. The term Castillian is sometimes used 
to refer to the Spanish language (particularly when an 
author wants to stress the fact that there are other 
languages spoken in Spain). Both Castillian and Spanish 
language refer to the same language, they are not 
different things.
</P>


<sect1 id="spanish-character"><heading>Characters used in Spanish</heading>

<P>
Spanish uses a Latin alphabet. The numerical characters 
used in Spanish are the Arabic numerals.
</P>

<P>
The character that distinguishes Spanish from other Latin alphabets 
is the &Ntilde; ('N' with tilde), which exists in uppercase and 
lowercase versions. Vowels in Spanish may have a mark (the accent) 
on top of them to indicate intensity intonation. This accent is 
required for orthography (written correctness) on lowercase vowels 
but it is optional in uppercase vowels. The letter 'u' may have a 
dieresis (like the German umlaut), both in uppercase and 
lowercase forms.
</P>

<P>
Some punctuation signs are characteristic of the Spanish 
language. The opening question mark and the opening 
exclamation sign look like the English question mark and 
exclamation sign rotated 180 degrees. The English question 
mark and exclamation sign are referred to as closing question 
mark and exclamation sign. The small underlined 'a' and 'o' are 
used mainly for ordinal numbers, similar to the small 'th' 
in English ordinals.
</P>

<sect1 id="spanish-sets"><heading>Character Sets</heading>

<P>
UNE (Una Norma Espa&ntilde;ola) is the National 
Standards Organization in Spain. UNE is a member of the ISO and 
standards that have one-to-one correspondence are usually 
called by their ISO number, rather than their UNE number.
</P>

<P>
ISO 8859-1, also known as ISO Latin-1, contains the characters 
required for Spanish.
</P>

<sect1 id="spanish-codesets"><heading>Codesets</heading>

<P>
The codeset mostly used for Spanish is ISO 8859-1. 
The codepage Windows 1252 a.k.a. Windows Latin-1 is a 
superset of ISO 8859-1 that adds some characters in the 
range 128 to 159. Other codesets are Unicode, Macintosh Roman 
(codepage 1000), MS-DOS Latin-1 (codepage 850) or less 
frequently MS-DOS Latin US (codepage 437) which contains
accented lowercase characters but not uppercase. Some 
additional Latin codesets are EBCDIC CP500 and CP 1026 
(used in IBM mainframes and terminal emulators), 
Adobe Standard (used as default for Postscript documents), 
Nextstep Latin, HP Roman 8 (for HPUX and Laserjet resident
printer fonts) and the Latin codepage in OS/2. 
They are all stateless, 8-bit codepages (with the 
exception of Unicode that is 16-bit).
</P>

<sect1 id="spanish-how"><heading>How These Codesets Are Used --- Information for Programmers</heading>

<P>
In most cases it is safe to use ISO 8859-1 characters. Some exceptions are
<list>
 <item>WWW browsers should recognize all codesets. 
 <item>Software which communicates with IBM mainframes, Macintosh, 
       MS-DOS, Nextstep, HPUX, OS/2 should handle the 
       corresponding encoding.
 <item>File names for Joliet-format CD-ROM used for Windows is 
       written in Unicode.
 <item>Postscript interpreters should handle the Adobe Standard character set.
 <item>Printer filters or drivers for HP printers should handle the 
       Roman-8 character set if using the internal fonts.
</list>
</P>

<sect1 id="spanish-columns"><heading>Columns</heading>

<P>
On console displays, each character occupies one column. Printed 
text can be equally spaced (one column per character) or 
proportionally spaced (a character can occupy fractionally 
more or less than a column, depending on its shape).
</P>

<P>
Note: Even when using Traditional Sorting, ch and ll occupy 
two columns. See the comment on Traditional sorting in 
<ref id="spanish-sort">.
</P>

<sect1 id="spanish-direction"><heading>Writing Direction</heading>

<P>
Spanish is normally written in left to right lines arranged 
from top to bottom of the page. For artistic purposes it might 
be written in top to bottom columns arranged left to right 
within the page. This columnar arrangement would be expected 
only in graphic and charting programs (e.g., a drawing program, 
a spreadsheet graph or a page layout program for composing 
brochures) but regular text editors wouldn't be expected to 
implement this style. 
</P>

<sect1 id="spanish-layout"><heading>Layout of Characters</heading>

<P>
In the Spanish language, words are separated by spaces 
and a line can be broken at a space, a punctuation sign or 
a hyphenated word.
</P>

<P>
There are several sets of paired characters in Spanish. 
Unlike English, question marks and exclamation signs are 
also paired. Other paired characters are the same as English 
(parenthesis, square brackets, and so forth). Opening 
characters shouldn't appear at the end of a line. 
Closing characters and punctuation signs such as period and 
comma shouldn't appear at the beginning of a line.
</P>

<P>
Words can be broken at a syllabus and hyphenated. Unlike 
English, syllabi in Spanish end in a vowel more often than 
in a consonant. Syllabi that end in a consonant letter are 
typically at the end of a word or followed by a syllabus 
that starts with another consonant. Anyway, the rules are
not completely consistent and a hyphenation 
dictionary has to be used.
</P>

<sect1 id="spanish-lang"><heading>LANG variable</heading>

<P>
For Bash
<example>
set meta-flag on        # keep all 8 bits for keyboard input
set output-meta on      # keep all 8 bits for terminal output
set convert-meta off    # don't convert escape sequences
export LC_CTYPE=ISO_8859_1
</example>
</P>

<P>
For Tcsh
<example>
setenv LANG C
setenv LC_CTYPE "iso_8859_1"
</example>
</P>

<sect1 id="spanish-input"><heading>Input from Keyboard</heading>

<P>
For the Spanish keyboard to work correctly, you need the command 
<tt>loadkeys /usr/lib/kbd/keytables/es.map</tt> in the corresponding 
startup (rc) file.
</P>

<P>
Most of the Spanish characters are input from the keyboard 
with a single stroke. A two-key combination is used for accent 
and dieresis marks above vowels. Traditional typewriter 
machines used a 'dead key' system with keys that would 
strike the paper without advancing the carriage to the 
next character.  Typing on a computer keyboard simulates 
this behavior, typing the accent or dieresis key does 
not produce any visible output until a vowel is typed 
afterwards. Usually if the accent or dieresis key is followed 
by a consonant, the accent key is ignored. Accented or 
dieresis characters cannot be used for shortcut keys 
for selecting options.
</P>

<P>
The words for Yes and No are S&iacute; (the character next to S is 'i'
with acute accent) and No. We would commonly use the S and N 
keys for a S&iacute;/No choice.
</P>

<P>
Spanish keyboards usually allow for typing not only the Spanish 
accent signs, but also the accent signs in French and other 
languages (grave accent, circumflex accent, umlaut on letters 
other than the u). Other character that is typically available 
is the cedilla C (that looks like a C with a comma underneath, 
used for Catalan, Portuguese and French words, for example). 
There is a Latin-American keyboard layout that does not contain 
the grave accent and the cedilla C.
</P>

<sect1 id="spanish-more"><heading>More Detailed Discussions</heading>

<sect2 id="spanish-sort"><heading>Sorting</heading>

<P>
Traditional Spanish considered the combinations CH and LL individual 
single letters. For usage in computers, this required an additional 
effort for sorting and character counting algorithms. It was 
decided that the savings in not requiring special algorithms 
was significant enough and that it would be acceptable to treat 
them as 2 separate letters. Some software that already had 
incorporated the special sorting algorithms now allows for 
choosing between 'Traditional Spanish Sort' and 'Modern Spanish Sort'.
</P>

<P>
Accents and dieresis are ignored for sorting purposes. The 
only exception is the rare case where two words are exactly 
the same and the accent is the only difference, the word with 
the unaccented character should be sorted first. E.g., 
cami&oacute;n (c-a-m-i-o with acute accent-n), camionero, 
este, &eacute;ste (e with acute accent-s-t-e).
</P>

<P>
The &ntilde; (n with tilde) is always sorted after the n and 
before the l. It cannot be intermixed with the n.
</P>

<sect2 id="spanish-number"><heading>Number format, date and 
currency symbols</heading>

<P>
The use of the dot and the comma as a thousands separator and 
for decimal places is usually the opposite of US English. 
E.g., 1.000,00 instead of 1,000.00. Some Spanish-speaking countries, 
notably Mexico, follow the same standards as the US. It is 
desirable that programs can handle both forms as an independent setting.
</P>

<P>
The usual date format is DD-MM-YYYY rather than MM-DD-YYYY, but 
again this depends on the specific country. It is desirable to have 
the date format as a configurable parameter.
</P>

<P>
The currency symbol can be prepended or appended to the number 
and it can be one or several characters long. E.g., 100 PTA for 
Spanish pesetas or N$ 100 for Mexican pesos. It is desirable that 
the symbol and position can be individually defined and to allow 
for currency symbols longer than 1-character.
</P>

<sect2 id="spanish-varieties"><heading>Varieties of Spanish</heading>

<P>
Spanish is spoken by a tremendous variety of people. Academics 
through the different Spanish-speaking countries realized 
that this could lead to a dismemberment of the language 
and founded the Academy of the Spanish Language. This 
academy has branches in most of the Spanish-speaking 
countries, there is a Royal Academy of the Spanish Language 
of Spain, an Academy of the Spanish Language of Mexico, 
et cetera. The members of this Academy study the local 
evolution of the languages in each country. They meet 
together to maintain a body of knowledge of what should 
be considered the Standard Spanish Language and what should 
be considered local or regional terms and slang terms. 
</P>

<P>
In most cases, software can use terms that are within the 
Standard set by the Academy. When new terms appear (e.g., 
when a new product is created that has no previous name in 
the Spanish language) each region typically starts using a 
new word. When there is one or two terms that become the 
de-facto standard, the Academy would incorporate the new 
term into the Standard. This is a very slow process and 
there will be temporary usages in different regions within 
the Spanish-speaking worlds that conflict with each other. 
Some people speak about Spain-Spanish and American-Spanish 
but most of the time it doesn't really make sense to make 
this distinction. First of all, even within America, there 
are differences between the local varieties that may be greater 
than the differences with Spain itself. E.g., Spanish as 
spoken in Mexico, Colombia and Argentina may have between 
them as much differences as each of them when compared to 
how it is spoken in Spain. A computer user in Ecuador may 
feel more comfortable overall with the terms used in Spain 
than with the terms used in Mexico (and of course, most 
comfortable with the terms used in Ecuador itself!). The 
options are to either produce one Spanish version of a 
software product that is an acceptable compromise (maybe 
not perfect) for all Spanish-speaking countries or to 
produce multiple versions to account for all the regional 
variations.
</P>

<P>
A plea to all the people who are localizing software into 
Spanish: Let's use our efforts judiciously and create one 
Spanish version and not many. Let's strive for a version 
that conforms to the Standards and that can be as widely 
accepted as possible for the areas not covered by the 
Standards. Wouldn't you rather have a new product translated, 
instead of two versions of a product where one matches your 
local variety of the language?
</P>

1
2	<sect id="spanish"><heading>Spanish language / used in Spain,
3	most of America and Equatorial Guinea</heading>
4
5
6
7	<P>
8	Section written by
9	Eusebio C Rufian-Zilbermann <email>eusebio@acm.org</email>.
10	</P>
11
12	<P>
13	Spanish is one of the official languages in Spain,
14	the official language in most of the countries in the American
15	continent and the official language in Equatorial Guinea.
16	It is spoken in many other regions where it is not the
17	official language. Other official languages in Spain are
18	Galician, Catalan and Basque. These other languages each
19	have their own specific issues with regards to Localization.
20	They are not described in this section of the document.
21	</P>
22
23	<P>
24	The Spanish Language derives from the variation spoken in
25	the Castille region. The term Castillian is sometimes used
26	to refer to the Spanish language (particularly when an
27	author wants to stress the fact that there are other
28	languages spoken in Spain). Both Castillian and Spanish
29	language refer to the same language, they are not
30	different things.
31	</P>
32
33
34	<sect1 id="spanish-character"><heading>Characters used in Spanish</heading>
35
36	<P>
37	Spanish uses a Latin alphabet. The numerical characters
38	used in Spanish are the Arabic numerals.
39	</P>
40
41	<P>
42	The character that distinguishes Spanish from other Latin alphabets
43	is the Ñ ('N' with tilde), which exists in uppercase and
44	lowercase versions. Vowels in Spanish may have a mark (the accent)
45	on top of them to indicate intensity intonation. This accent is
46	required for orthography (written correctness) on lowercase vowels
47	but it is optional in uppercase vowels. The letter 'u' may have a
48	dieresis (like the German umlaut), both in uppercase and
49	lowercase forms.
50	</P>
51
52	<P>
53	Some punctuation signs are characteristic of the Spanish
54	language. The opening question mark and the opening
55	exclamation sign look like the English question mark and
56	exclamation sign rotated 180 degrees. The English question
57	mark and exclamation sign are referred to as closing question
58	mark and exclamation sign. The small underlined 'a' and 'o' are
59	used mainly for ordinal numbers, similar to the small 'th'
60	in English ordinals.
61	</P>
62
63	<sect1 id="spanish-sets"><heading>Character Sets</heading>
64
65	<P>
66	UNE (Una Norma Española) is the National
67	Standards Organization in Spain. UNE is a member of the ISO and
68	standards that have one-to-one correspondence are usually
69	called by their ISO number, rather than their UNE number.
70	</P>
71
72	<P>
73	ISO 8859-1, also known as ISO Latin-1, contains the characters
74	required for Spanish.
75	</P>
76
77	<sect1 id="spanish-codesets"><heading>Codesets</heading>
78
79	<P>
80	The codeset mostly used for Spanish is ISO 8859-1.
81	The codepage Windows 1252 a.k.a. Windows Latin-1 is a
82	superset of ISO 8859-1 that adds some characters in the
83	range 128 to 159. Other codesets are Unicode, Macintosh Roman
84	(codepage 1000), MS-DOS Latin-1 (codepage 850) or less
85	frequently MS-DOS Latin US (codepage 437) which contains
86	accented lowercase characters but not uppercase. Some
87	additional Latin codesets are EBCDIC CP500 and CP 1026
88	(used in IBM mainframes and terminal emulators),
89	Adobe Standard (used as default for Postscript documents),
90	Nextstep Latin, HP Roman 8 (for HPUX and Laserjet resident
91	printer fonts) and the Latin codepage in OS/2.
92	They are all stateless, 8-bit codepages (with the
93	exception of Unicode that is 16-bit).
94	</P>
95
96	<sect1 id="spanish-how"><heading>How These Codesets Are Used --- Information for Programmers</heading>
97
98	<P>
99	In most cases it is safe to use ISO 8859-1 characters. Some exceptions are
100	<list>
101	<item>WWW browsers should recognize all codesets.
102	<item>Software which communicates with IBM mainframes, Macintosh,
103	MS-DOS, Nextstep, HPUX, OS/2 should handle the
104	corresponding encoding.
105	<item>File names for Joliet-format CD-ROM used for Windows is
106	written in Unicode.
107	<item>Postscript interpreters should handle the Adobe Standard character set.
108	<item>Printer filters or drivers for HP printers should handle the
109	Roman-8 character set if using the internal fonts.
110	</list>
111	</P>
112
113	<sect1 id="spanish-columns"><heading>Columns</heading>
114
115	<P>
116	On console displays, each character occupies one column. Printed
117	text can be equally spaced (one column per character) or
118	proportionally spaced (a character can occupy fractionally
119	more or less than a column, depending on its shape).
120	</P>
121
122	<P>
123	Note: Even when using Traditional Sorting, ch and ll occupy
124	two columns. See the comment on Traditional sorting in
125	<ref id="spanish-sort">.
126	</P>
127
128	<sect1 id="spanish-direction"><heading>Writing Direction</heading>
129
130	<P>
131	Spanish is normally written in left to right lines arranged
132	from top to bottom of the page. For artistic purposes it might
133	be written in top to bottom columns arranged left to right
134	within the page. This columnar arrangement would be expected
135	only in graphic and charting programs (e.g., a drawing program,
136	a spreadsheet graph or a page layout program for composing
137	brochures) but regular text editors wouldn't be expected to
138	implement this style.
139	</P>
140
141	<sect1 id="spanish-layout"><heading>Layout of Characters</heading>
142
143	<P>
144	In the Spanish language, words are separated by spaces
145	and a line can be broken at a space, a punctuation sign or
146	a hyphenated word.
147	</P>
148
149	<P>
150	There are several sets of paired characters in Spanish.
151	Unlike English, question marks and exclamation signs are
152	also paired. Other paired characters are the same as English
153	(parenthesis, square brackets, and so forth). Opening
154	characters shouldn't appear at the end of a line.
155	Closing characters and punctuation signs such as period and
156	comma shouldn't appear at the beginning of a line.
157	</P>
158
159	<P>
160	Words can be broken at a syllabus and hyphenated. Unlike
161	English, syllabi in Spanish end in a vowel more often than
162	in a consonant. Syllabi that end in a consonant letter are
163	typically at the end of a word or followed by a syllabus
164	that starts with another consonant. Anyway, the rules are
165	not completely consistent and a hyphenation
166	dictionary has to be used.
167	</P>
168
169	<sect1 id="spanish-lang"><heading>LANG variable</heading>
170
171	<P>
172	For Bash
173	<example>
174	set meta-flag on # keep all 8 bits for keyboard input
175	set output-meta on # keep all 8 bits for terminal output
176	set convert-meta off # don't convert escape sequences
177	export LC_CTYPE=ISO_8859_1
178	</example>
179	</P>
180
181	<P>
182	For Tcsh
183	<example>
184	setenv LANG C
185	setenv LC_CTYPE "iso_8859_1"
186	</example>
187	</P>
188
189	<sect1 id="spanish-input"><heading>Input from Keyboard</heading>
190
191	<P>
192	For the Spanish keyboard to work correctly, you need the command
193	<tt>loadkeys /usr/lib/kbd/keytables/es.map</tt> in the corresponding
194	startup (rc) file.
195	</P>
196
197	<P>
198	Most of the Spanish characters are input from the keyboard
199	with a single stroke. A two-key combination is used for accent
200	and dieresis marks above vowels. Traditional typewriter
201	machines used a 'dead key' system with keys that would
202	strike the paper without advancing the carriage to the
203	next character. Typing on a computer keyboard simulates
204	this behavior, typing the accent or dieresis key does
205	not produce any visible output until a vowel is typed
206	afterwards. Usually if the accent or dieresis key is followed
207	by a consonant, the accent key is ignored. Accented or
208	dieresis characters cannot be used for shortcut keys
209	for selecting options.
210	</P>
211
212	<P>
213	The words for Yes and No are Sí (the character next to S is 'i'
214	with acute accent) and No. We would commonly use the S and N
215	keys for a Sí/No choice.
216	</P>
217
218	<P>
219	Spanish keyboards usually allow for typing not only the Spanish
220	accent signs, but also the accent signs in French and other
221	languages (grave accent, circumflex accent, umlaut on letters
222	other than the u). Other character that is typically available
223	is the cedilla C (that looks like a C with a comma underneath,
224	used for Catalan, Portuguese and French words, for example).
225	There is a Latin-American keyboard layout that does not contain
226	the grave accent and the cedilla C.
227	</P>
228
229	<sect1 id="spanish-more"><heading>More Detailed Discussions</heading>
230
231	<sect2 id="spanish-sort"><heading>Sorting</heading>
232
233	<P>
234	Traditional Spanish considered the combinations CH and LL individual
235	single letters. For usage in computers, this required an additional
236	effort for sorting and character counting algorithms. It was
237	decided that the savings in not requiring special algorithms
238	was significant enough and that it would be acceptable to treat
239	them as 2 separate letters. Some software that already had
240	incorporated the special sorting algorithms now allows for
241	choosing between 'Traditional Spanish Sort' and 'Modern Spanish Sort'.
242	</P>
243
244	<P>
245	Accents and dieresis are ignored for sorting purposes. The
246	only exception is the rare case where two words are exactly
247	the same and the accent is the only difference, the word with
248	the unaccented character should be sorted first. E.g.,
249	camión (c-a-m-i-o with acute accent-n), camionero,
250	este, éste (e with acute accent-s-t-e).
251	</P>
252
253	<P>
254	The ñ (n with tilde) is always sorted after the n and
255	before the l. It cannot be intermixed with the n.
256	</P>
257
258	<sect2 id="spanish-number"><heading>Number format, date and
259	currency symbols</heading>
260
261	<P>
262	The use of the dot and the comma as a thousands separator and
263	for decimal places is usually the opposite of US English.
264	E.g., 1.000,00 instead of 1,000.00. Some Spanish-speaking countries,
265	notably Mexico, follow the same standards as the US. It is
266	desirable that programs can handle both forms as an independent setting.
267	</P>
268
269	<P>
270	The usual date format is DD-MM-YYYY rather than MM-DD-YYYY, but
271	again this depends on the specific country. It is desirable to have
272	the date format as a configurable parameter.
273	</P>
274
275	<P>
276	The currency symbol can be prepended or appended to the number
277	and it can be one or several characters long. E.g., 100 PTA for
278	Spanish pesetas or N$ 100 for Mexican pesos. It is desirable that
279	the symbol and position can be individually defined and to allow
280	for currency symbols longer than 1-character.
281	</P>
282
283	<sect2 id="spanish-varieties"><heading>Varieties of Spanish</heading>
284
285	<P>
286	Spanish is spoken by a tremendous variety of people. Academics
287	through the different Spanish-speaking countries realized
288	that this could lead to a dismemberment of the language
289	and founded the Academy of the Spanish Language. This
290	academy has branches in most of the Spanish-speaking
291	countries, there is a Royal Academy of the Spanish Language
292	of Spain, an Academy of the Spanish Language of Mexico,
293	et cetera. The members of this Academy study the local
294	evolution of the languages in each country. They meet
295	together to maintain a body of knowledge of what should
296	be considered the Standard Spanish Language and what should
297	be considered local or regional terms and slang terms.
298	</P>
299
300	<P>
301	In most cases, software can use terms that are within the
302	Standard set by the Academy. When new terms appear (e.g.,
303	when a new product is created that has no previous name in
304	the Spanish language) each region typically starts using a
305	new word. When there is one or two terms that become the
306	de-facto standard, the Academy would incorporate the new
307	term into the Standard. This is a very slow process and
308	there will be temporary usages in different regions within
309	the Spanish-speaking worlds that conflict with each other.
310	Some people speak about Spain-Spanish and American-Spanish
311	but most of the time it doesn't really make sense to make
312	this distinction. First of all, even within America, there
313	are differences between the local varieties that may be greater
314	than the differences with Spain itself. E.g., Spanish as
315	spoken in Mexico, Colombia and Argentina may have between
316	them as much differences as each of them when compared to
317	how it is spoken in Spain. A computer user in Ecuador may
318	feel more comfortable overall with the terms used in Spain
319	than with the terms used in Mexico (and of course, most
320	comfortable with the terms used in Ecuador itself!). The
321	options are to either produce one Spanish version of a
322	software product that is an acceptable compromise (maybe
323	not perfect) for all Spanish-speaking countries or to
324	produce multiple versions to account for all the regional
325	variations.
326	</P>
327
328	<P>
329	A plea to all the people who are localizing software into
330	Spanish: Let's use our efforts judiciously and create one
331	Spanish version and not many. Let's strive for a version
332	that conforms to the Standards and that can be as widely
333	accepted as possible for the areas not covered by the
334	Standards. Wouldn't you rather have a new product translated,
335	instead of two versions of a product where one matches your
336	local variety of the language?
337	</P>
338