Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Apple Internationalization Status (2006)

The OS X user interface supports the following language localizations for menus and dialogues: English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. Russian is also available for download from apple.ru.

OS X display can handle any language covered by Unicode and for which an appropriate font has been installed, although individual apps may have lesser capabilities. Apple itself provides input keyboards and fonts for Arabic, Azeri, Armenian, Bulgarian, Byelorussian, Catalan, Cherokee, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Devanagari, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, German, Greek (regular and polytonic), Gujarati, Gurmurkhi (Punjabi), Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Inuktitut, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Maori, Nepali, Northern Sami, Norwegian, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Vietnamese, and Welsh.

The iPod user interface supports Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Traditional Chinese and Turkish.

iPod display of song info and notes covers the interface languages plus Bulgarian, Croatian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian and Ukrainian.

5 comments:

Magnus Lewan said...

Good info. You may want to make it more clear that it is the status for current products. My first iPod did not have any Russian ui, for example.

Tom Gewecke said...

Yes! Thanks, done.

Smokey Ardisson said...

My goodness, first I discover Michael Everson has a blog, and then I find Mr. Multilingual Mac himself is blogging helpful tips, too! It's been an exciting week for me. I'm learning a lot catching up in the archives, and I look forward to more of your multilingual Mac resources.

Unknown said...

I'm having problems with typing in Korean in my mac. when i give it a space it gives an unusual amount of space. when i email the document and open in a pc, it opens and shows correctly with the correct spacing. but when i view it on my mac or type in my mac the spacing is very off. what's wrong? please help! thanks

Tom Gewecke said...

Are you using MS Word when you input Korean? If so, you might try another app, as Word has all kinds of quirks with non-Roman scripts. Or ask in the newsgroups which MS runs to solve their problems:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/community/community.aspx?pid=newsgroups