User:Champy04/sandbox

Localization and Kinsoku Shori (In Japanese: 禁則処理)

What is Kinsoku Shori?

Kinsoku Shori are word wrapping rules that apply specifically to the Japanese language. Similar rules also apply to other East Asian languages such as Chinese and Korean.

Here are some examples of characters that cannot be placed at the start of a line: Small characters such as ッ, ャ, ョ. Punctuations such as. 、 Closing brackets such as }, 」, )

To see the full example, please visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_breaking_rules_in_East_Asian_languages

Many word processing software products have built in features to control line breaking so that an incorrect character does not come at the start of a line. The characters which cannot be separated will remain together. Examples of such software are Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Word.

Why is this important to localization?

The Japanese language becomes hard to read if those characters appear at the start of line, or are separated on two lines. Also, for marketing headers or other highly visible text, incorrect line breaks are considered to be a sign of unprofessional design work.

While some word processing and desktop publishing software products automatically do Kinsoku Shori. But, it is often overlooked during web page internationalization and localization. It is not a simple process because each browser behaves differently. Maintaining Kinsoku Shori in various screen sizes, across multiple devices is not easy. There are ways to take care of Kinsoku Shori using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Currently, layout errors caused by line breaks or a lack of Kinsoku Shori are fixed manually. For example, a linguistic QA tester logs a bug, then the developer fixes it as needed. It is not possible to apply Kinsoku Shori to the entire web page manually. Therefore, lower visibility text is often left as it is.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_breaking_rules_in_East_Asian_languages https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%A6%81%E5%89%87%E5%87%A6%E7%90%86 https://w3c.github.io/i18n-tests/results/line-breaks-jazh