New Unicode Working Group: Message Formatting

at time on dateOne of the challenges in adapting programs to work with
different languages is message formatting. This is the process of
formatting and inserting data values into messages in the user’s
language. For example, “The package will arrive at /{time}/ on /{date}/”
could be translated into German as “Das Paket wird am /{date}/ um
/{time}/ geliefert”, and the particular /{time}/ and /{date}/ variables
would be automatically formatted for German, and inserted in the right
places.

The Unicode Consortium has provided message formatting for some time via
the ICU programming libraries and CLDR locale data repository. But until
now we have not had a syntax for localizable message strings
standardized by Unicode. Furthermore, the current ICU MessageFormat is
relatively complex for existing operations, such as plural forms, and it
does not scale well to other language properties, such as gender and
inflections.

The Unicode CLDR Technical Committee is formalizing a new working group
to develop a technical specification for message format that addresses
these issues. That working group is called the Message Format Working
Group and is chaired by Romulo Cintra from CaixaBank. Other participants
currently represented are Amazon, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, IBM,
Mozilla, OpenJSF, and Paypal.

For information on how to get involved, visit the working group’s GitHub
page: https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg

Open discussions will take place on GitHub, and written notes will be
posted after every meeting.

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http://blog.unicode.org/2020/01/new-unicode-working-group-message.html

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