Chinese Words

I had a private message asking about possible ways to make Alice more accessable for Chinese speakers. One idea was to rename and copy objects and then move them to a separate folder in the gallery. I did a couple of experiments, and this seems possible (an example - the zipped file - is attached), with the following limitations:

1. The Roman alphabet (pinyin) version of the name has to be used. Alice gives errors if the Chinese symbols are used either for saving or for import.

(I used the translator at http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/charlook.pl), which will also go from both English and from Chinese symbols to pinyin. Since I don't know Chinese, I hope the translation is reasonaably accurate. )

2. The top level of the object reverts to it's initial name when imported. This could probably be fixed by actually editing the .a2c file - but that doesn't seem to be worthwhile since the subobject names do import unchanged. If necessary, you could just rename the subobjects CatTail, etc.

3. Note that for any case, exporting and re-importing subobjects will always give "errors/warnings" that sometimes do indicate real problems.

I just ran a check to see whether comments in Alice would support Chinese symbols - which are supported in at least some Unicode standards. The answer seems to be a partial yes - they won't be displayed correctly from within Alice but also won't cause any errors, unlike with object names. From there, you can copy the undefined part of the string into a program that does display them correctly and they look fine.

Originally Posted by DrJim

I just ran a check to see whether comments in Alice would support Chinese symbols - which are supported in at least some Unicode standards. The answer seems to be a partial yes - they won't be displayed correctly from within Alice but also won't cause any errors, unlike with object names. From there, you can copy the undefined part of the string into a program that does display them correctly and they look fine.

there is a CN PO file in Scratch, so Scratch can display chinese correctly, do we can add a PO file into Alice, then Alice can display chinese correctly too.

[meirs]

As part of the Unicode improvements over Alice2.2, Mama lets you enter and use Chinese letters (or any other language letters) for naming anything in your world: methods, properties, variables, worlds, etc.