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Lost in translation

Posted on 24 Oct 2005 at 16:05

Paul Ockenden looks at multilingual requirements for global websites, while Mark Newton continues his server move to Canary Wharf

He would, wouldn't he?

Staying on the subject of language, it's fascinating how online linguistic development is starting to mirror what you find in the offline world. First, there's the plethora of new words being coined - broadband, blog, bot - while other established words are gaining new meanings, like blink, bounce, bump. Second, and even more interestingly, various parts of the Internet are starting to develop their own regional dialects. Stumble into many forums for the first time and it's a bit like trying to listen to the conversation of teenagers. You'll see people using words that you don't know (or in ways you don't recognise), and the older and more established the forum the more likely this is to happen.

One of the oldest online communities in the UK is Cix. As you may have read in the Online column about a year ago, Cix has now been going for nearly 20 years, and you'll find most of PC Pro's Real World contributors, plus a few editors, on there. This community has built up an established dialect of its own, and in particular a number of unique phrases and acronyms. Urban myths, for example, are called 'dead grannies' on Cix - a name coined by our very own Steve Cassidy about 15 years ago. Indeed, there are so many Cix-specific acronyms that the official offline reader software (Ameol) has a special add-on to decode them.

One particular acronym that's pretty well exclusive to Cix is MRDA. No, it isn't a new hospital superbug, nor is it a new rave drug. Rather, it has its roots in the Profumo Affair, that politics-and-sex scandal from the early 1960s. We'll spare you the sordid details, but the important event was when a witness called Mandy Rice Davies hit the headlines by responding to a court statement that a peer had denied paying her for sex thus: 'Well, he would, wouldn't he?' (Many people seem to misremember it as 'Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?'). Anyway, that Cix acronym MRDA stands for 'Mandy Rice Davies Applies'. If someone from Microsoft posts a message praising a Microsoft product, someone else might reply 'MRDA', meaning he would say that, wouldn't he? Likewise, if one of us were to write something praising a company that also happened to be one of our clients, we might affix an MRDA to the message to make it obvious to readers that we're well aware of the potential conflict of interest. The sharper ones among you might now have spotted where we're going with this... yup, we'll be writing about one of our own clients soon. But more on that next month.

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky

We're in a slightly hysterical mood this month, so if we see one more generic 1U server loaded up with a selection of freeware or GPLed software and packaged as a 'network appliance' we're also going to scream our heads off. These things are sold for prices that put them out of the reach of most. One of Paul's client firms was recently evaluating a network scanner appliance that was going to cost £22,000.

On pulling it apart, he found it consisted of a Windows PC running an (elderly) Win32 port of snort (see www.snort.org) behind a clumsy front end written in ASP. The worst thing about this box was that its copy of Windows 2000 Server was nowhere near patched up to date, so just plugging this so-called security appliance into the network could have been a disaster. There seem to be lots of such 'appliances' springing up at the moment, and all we can say is tread very carefully and make sure you know what you're buying. Read PC Pro Enterprise for starters. If you still expect something to be good just because it cost a lot of money, pop over to Amazon and search for a book with the ISBN 0721415563.