Keyboards and Internationalization

A Lingoport White Paper

Authored by Olivier Libouban
Globalization Lead at Lingoport
www.lingoport.com

November, 18th, 2011

 Table of Contents

Introduction........................................................................................................................................2
Keyboards Basics ................................................................................................................................2
Keyboard Layouts Examples ................................................................................................................2
Mapping Between Keyboard and Actual Input .......................................................................................4
IME: Input Method Editor ....................................................................................................................4
Background.....................................................................................................................................4
IME ................................................................................................................................................4
Chinese IME Types ..........................................................................................................................5
Romanization ..............................................................................................................................5
Component- and stroke-based IME ...............................................................................................5
Chinese Layout and IME ..................................................................................................................6
Overview .....................................................................................................................................6
Bopomofo/Zhuyin fuhao: ..............................................................................................................6
ChangJie or Cangjie: ....................................................................................................................6
Dayi: ...........................................................................................................................................6
In-Depth Look at Regional and Keyboard Settings .................................................................................7
About Lingoport ................................................................................................................................ 12

www.lingoport.com Page 1 Keyboards Internationalization

Introduction
Congratulations, your software is now shipping throughout the world. Now, what happens to folks who
need to enter data? What happens if your clients want to enter Japanese ideograms? Could they do that
with a US keyboard? Conversely, what if Japanese users need to type in US text? Is your application able
to handle switching from one locale to another and still let the user enter data?

Keyboards Basics
Keyboards are mostly hardware devices which send codes to an operating system. Those codes
correspond to letters.
―Computer keyboards include control circuitry to convert key presses into key codes that
the computer‘s electronics can understand.‖
―The character code produced by any key press is determined by the keyboard driver
software. A key press generates a scancode which is interpreted as an alphanumeric
character or control function.‖
The input character code can they be mapped to a character for a given OS. The fact that I
click on the ‗a‘ letter on my keyboard does not always mean the letter ‗a‘ will be input in
my software. It depends mostly on operating system settings.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_(computing)

Keyboard Layouts Examples

Here are some keyboard layouts for different languages:

Figure 1: Hebrew keyboard (Google Translate)

Figure 2: Russian keyboard (Google translate)

www.lingoport.com Page 2 Keyboards Internationalization

Japanese needs to handle hiragana, katakana, and ideographs. A software keyboard (for a touch screen,
used more and more for different devices, from hand-held phones to embedded devices) could follow this
pattern, where the layout and the keys switch from one to the other and to US English keyboard using
control keys:

www.lingoport.com Page 3 Keyboards Internationalization

Mapping Between Keyboard and Actual Input
Keeping the same hardware keyboard, a regular US keyboard, let‘s change the Microsoft setting for
this combination of keys: “q`az^o”.
Microsoft Setting Result in MS Word

q`az^o

qàzô

a²qw6o

たろちつぉら

IME: Input Method Editor

Background
Some writing systems have thousands of possible ideographs, like Chinese and Japanese. Some writing
systems are based on ideographic stems, like Korean. Let‘s take Chinese to illustrate the major points.
Because the set of Chinese characters is so huge, it is highly impractical (and for any practical keyboard,
impossible) to try to map each character to a single key. Therefore, inputting Chinese characters resort to
schemes involving sequences of key presses to select specific Chinese characters or sequences of
characters from the available repertoire supported.

IME
An Input Method Editor is shortened to IME or sometimes called Input Method. It is a scheme to input
Chinese or Japanese characters using a reduced set of keys. Depending on what particular method is
used to input and select particular characters, IME‘s have specific names. They may also differ in strategy
between inputting Chinese characters for the Chinese language and Chinese characters for the Japanese

www.lingoport.com Page 4 Keyboards Internationalization

language (kanji), based on different linguistic expectations of the users and differences in the particular
repertoire of characters that needs to be supported.
The ideogram ―人員 ‖ is obtained by typing the following sequence typed on a US keyboard
―o<Space><Shift>8<space>”, with the following IME setting: ―CH, Chinese Traditional
ChangJie‖.
Common input methods for Chinese make use of romanization. Others are based on character
component and stroke-based methods. There is also direct input of hexadecimal character values.

Chinese IME Types

Romanization
漢語拼音, Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, or just ―pinyin‖ for short is the most common Chinese IME. Pinyin represents
each syllable of Beijing Chinese (People‘s Republic of China Modern Standard) by means of a combination
of Latin characters, optionally modified by tone marks. The tone marks consist either of numbers at the
end of the syllable or diacritics placed on the main vowel.
A given syllable as Romanized in pinyin may correspond to one or — more often — to many particular
Chinese characters. The user types in the pinyin syllable as a sequence of Latin characters (and the tone
indicators). When the syllable is to be converted to the correct Chinese character for input, the input
method presents the user with a choice of ideograms having that pronunciation.

The user can select one of them by use of the mouse or by shifting a selection number.
Component- and stroke-based IME
Learning to write Chinese by hand involves learning basic strokes. This type of IME is based on the
graphological aspect of the characters. Each graphical unit is represented by a basic character
component. There are 24 components in all, each mapped to a particular letter key on a standard
QWERTY keyboard. The user types some base strokes represented on the keyboard and the IME
proposes a set of ideograms which could be derived from the sequence. The user then selects an
ideogram either by clicking with a mouse or by a number associated with it.

www.lingoport.com Page 5 Keyboards Internationalization

Chinese Layout and IME
Overview
The codes of three input methods are typically printed on the Chinese (traditional) keyboard:
 Zhuyin, upper right;
 Cangjie, lower left; and
 Dayi, lower right.

Bopomofo/Zhuyin fuhao:
(pinyin: Zhùyīn fúhào; Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄨˊ ㄏㄠˋ; literally ―phonetic symbol‖) or zhuyin

fuxao, often abbreviated as zhuyin and colloquially called bopomofo,[1] was introduced in the 1910s as
the first official phonetic system for transcribing Chinese, especially Mandarin.
Consisting of 37 characters and four tone marks, it transcribes all possible sounds in Mandarin. Despite
being phased out in China in the 1950s, this system is still widely used as an educational tool and in
Taiwan.
ChangJie or Cangjie:
The ChangJie IME is based on the basic strokes of the ideograms which give it its shape.
Dayi:
Dayi (Chinese: 大易; pinyin: dàyì, literally ―big easy‖) uses a set of 46 character components laid out on a
standard QWERTY keyboard. A Chinese character is built by combining up to four of the 40 of the 46
characters (the other six are provided for typing Taiwanese addresses), using a system similar to that of
Cangjie, but is decomposed in stroke order instead of in geometric shape in Cangjie.

www.lingoport.com Page 6 Keyboards Internationalization

In-Depth Look at Regional and Keyboard Settings
Most operating systems will let you switch between settings for your keyboard. It does not necessarily
mean you have to switch the hardware keyboard, even though it may seem natural. You could type US
English text with a Russian hardware keyboard for instance; it may be easier to plug in a US English
keyboard for those operating system settings.
The following gives an example of settings on Windows XP to indicate which layout the user will be using,
i.e. which actual software character/text will be input when clicking on a hardware or software key. Other
windows systems will have similar configurations. The target locales are Chinese and Turkish for the
purpose of this illustration. Other languages follow the same settings.
1. Add Chinese and Turkish to the language settings of your system. Go to Windows status bar and
click ―Start | Settings | Control Panel‖. Double click the icon ―Regional and Language‖. Depending
on your version of Windows, it may look like the following:

2. On the ―Languages‖ tab, check the box before ―Install files for East Asian Languages‖ or other
languages as needed under section ―Supplemental language support.‖

Note: after this step, you may have to reboot the system.

www.lingoport.com Page 7 Keyboards Internationalization

 3. On the Advanced tab, make sure the code pages conversion tables are setup for those programs
not using Unicode. Here is the Turkish example. The East Asian languages are at the top of the list.

www.lingoport.com Page 8 Keyboards Internationalization

 4. Open the Text Services and input Languages dialog by right clicking on the ―CH‖ or ―EN‖ or ―TR‖
language symbol in the bottom right of your screen. Add the keyboard needed for Chinese
(depending on the client, it could be for instance Chinese PRC – Microsoft Pinyin) or Turkish (Q for
Turkish).

5. After Windows copied some files into your local drive, you will be prompted the following Window.
Click the ―Yes‖ button. You can then be prompted to restart Windows. Click Yes button to restart
Windows.

6. After Windows is restarted, a language input icon will be displayed on your Windows status bar.

Move the cursor on top of ―EN‖ icon, click the right mouse button, then click the ―Properties‖
button.

www.lingoport.com Page 9 Keyboards Internationalization

 7. On the ―Input Locales‖ tab, select ―CH Chinese (PRC) Chinese (Simplifies) – US Keyboard‖ entry,
then click on the ―Properties‖ button.

8. On the ―Input Locale Properties‖ window, select the input method you prefer. If you know Pinyin,
you can choose ―Chinese (Simplified) – MS-PinYin98″ and click OK button.

www.lingoport.com Page 10 Keyboards Internationalization

 9. After you come back to the ―Regional Options‖ window, the Chinese input icon will be changed to
MS-PinYin98. If you want, you can set this input method as the default by clicking on the ―Set as
Default‖ button. Click OK button to close this window.

10. For the same language, you may have installed different keyboards. For instance, Turkish shows
two different ones:

11. At that point, opening an editor like Notepad will let you type text in with a keyboard configured for
a language with an input method and font set up to display the text correctly. You may still have
an English hardware keyboard, but it will act, for example, like a Turkish keyboard.

www.lingoport.com Page 11 Keyboards Internationalization

About Lingoport
Lingoport offers a wide range of internationalization services combined with the power of Globalyzer, a
client/server internationalization software system that works together to scan code and step engineers
through internationalization issues in a wide variety of programming languages, to help your company
achieve its global software release goals, on time and on budget.
Our teams of architects, project leaders and engineers will help you meet your global release objectives
while augmenting your engineering team‘s product development efforts.
Lingoport‘s internationalization expertise and services include:
 Internationalization planning, requirements development and assessments
 Detailed code review, architectural direction, project planning
 Internationalization software development
 Globalization testing
 Internationalization training and more.

Learn more about Lingoport at www.lingoport.com and www.globalyzer.com. For a technical discussion,
a free quote, or a guided tour and demonstration of Globalyzer, please contact us at [email protected]
or by phone at 303.444.8020 (USA).

www.lingoport.com Page 12 Keyboards Internationalization