Non romanic alphabets and NFS.

JamesAnderson · #1

This came to mind today when doing work for some Japanese names that came into the Jordan River Temple today.

Many know that data using non-romanic alphabets and character sets ('romanic' refers to what English, Spanish, German, and some oher languages use for alphabets, you're looking at those right now), have never shown in any computerized version of FamilySearch.

With these names turning up more and more at our temples (hats off to the Temple Department for making it possible to print these names out at nearly any temple now) using such languages as Japanese, Korean, the cyrillic languages like Russian and Ukrainian, and in one case some ten years ago I got about 30 names in antoehr language that used a non-romanic alphabet, how are those that use NFS that are looking for those names going to be able to find them?

In other words, will they have to know the romanized spelling of the name, or will the person reading romanized spellings have to know how to search for the names in the original non-romanic language characters?

And displaying them in web browsers as well. Language display plugins exist but sometimes they play a game of hide and seek. Will there be a way to locate and download those as well?

WelchTC · #2

I wonder if [thread=245]this[/thread] type of technology could help.

Tom

#3

Well since Unicode contains enough space for all those character sets (most just have a subset installed and need to expand it to display other languages) I think that the information will be in Unicode and the browser will have to install the expansions.

russellhltn · #4

The issue is one of searching. If the name was stored in Kanji and the search was being done in Romanji, then a match would not be found unless the computer had a way of translating between the two. I think the translation for Japanese is very straight forward. Other languages are not so nice.

#5

Maybe build in a character conversion into the site so it translates the characters or allows you to insert special characters.

russellhltn · #6

I think the question is how is nFS addressing this issue, not what can be done.

JamesAnderson · #7

Russell, that was my intent with the question.

Especially when there will be large numbers of users. And there will obviously be two ways data will enter the system.

One will come from native-speakers and writers of the languages in question, the other will come from indexing and extraction. The best case scenario would be for the name and all data associated with it where the original is in a non-romanic form to appear in romanized form and in the original language, so all can read it who need to, regardless of experience with the language.

After all, there are those researching ancestry in those areas who will know little or nothing of the language or even how to read and interpret the data provided.

#8

RussellHltn wrote:I think the question is how is nFS addressing this issue, not what can be done.

During the beta test earlier in 2007 (beta 2, IIUC), there were different templates for name entry. The template for Japanese provided three different slots for entering a name: Kanji, Kana, Romaji. The template for Korean had something similar. If I understood correctly, entry in the three slots was manual. Was that info helpful?

russellhltn · #9

rmrichesjr wrote:During the beta test earlier in 2007 (beta 2, IIUC), there were different templates for name entry.

Is this for adding a name to the database or for searching?

#10

RussellHltn wrote:Is this for adding a name to the database or for searching?

Now that you mention it, I don't recall checking what the template setting did (or did not do) for searching. I could hazard some guesses, but it appears you want facts, not gueses.

Actually, in another thread (one I started) somebody said St. Louis is live with NFS. Maybe there's somebody in a temple district that could clarify.