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Tips of i18n for Spanish

Karina on July 31, 2019

Internalization for Spanish Internalization is a big word, so I will use i18n for this article. If you are reading this, you understand ...

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Lito • Jul 31 '19

Now in Spain you can choose the order of first and second surnames for your sons from father and mother first surname. Then you should use Primer Apellido and Segundo Apellido instead Apellido Materno and Apellido Paterno. Also to respect lgtbi sons :)

hidden_dude • Aug 1 '19

I find its just easier to say "Nombres" and "Apellidos"

You can never know these days how many people have.

Lito • Aug 1 '19

It depends :)

In Spain a lot of databases store first and second surname into differents columns.

On frontend forms, first surname is required and second is optional.

On regular communications we use name and first surname for greeting.

hidden_dude • Aug 1 '19

yeah.. but I just wouldn't complicate my software. Sometimes I even just have a single "Full name" if I don't need to separate.

there are scenarios where I want to know your maternal/paternal heritage, but in general I don't care. I just want to know how to show your name on the screen.

Lito • Aug 1 '19

Yes, but a lot of times is not your software, is only the software that you code ;)

Karina • Aug 1 '19

Oh, cool! In Mexico, I'm not sure if we have that. They should do this in all the countries. I wish my government did this too.

Hugo Hernández Valdez • Jul 31 '19

Muy buen post y tips 😊 fue muy graciosa la explicación de "Tortillera".

Karina • Jul 31 '19

¡Gracias! No sabía que habían personas que hablan Español aquí 😃

David Ojeda • Aug 1 '19

🇲🇽🤘🏼

Hugo Hernández Valdez • Jul 31 '19

Creo que algunos hehe, también me acabo de dar cuenta 😆

Uli Troyo • Jul 31 '19 • Edited

¡Buen artículo! On the subject of names:

Apparently, developers get names wrong alot. I recently saw this on Twitter; had to re-think my validations:

Zi Ye

@majormcdoom

App devs, could you please not do this? I'm so sick and tired of this.
I understand doing this for usernames, but this is my NAME, ffs. It's for display, not logging in.

20:37 PM - 18 Jul 2019

1730 5903

Edit: oh, and in fact, while in the subject of Spanish, there is this great Cuban musician named X Alfonso. First name X. How cool is that? Let's not exclude him from our apps either:

Karina • Aug 1 '19

Yes! My friend name is Teresita del Niño Jesús, too long for apps.

Thank you!

Andrés Pérez • Jul 31 '19

Recently I watched this video youtube.com/watch?v=0j74jcxSunY it explains the issues with i18n pretty well!

Uli Troyo • Jul 31 '19

Oooh, Computerphile featuring Tom Scott! I approve this message!

By the way, you can make embedded videos visible on Dev.to! Just put this in the editor and replace VIDEO_ID with the.. you know, video ID:

{% youtube VIDEO_ID %}

You can do that with more than YouTube embeds, too! Check out their short editor guide for more goodies.

Andrés Pérez • Jul 31 '19

Wow, thank you! didn't know you could do that :D

Karina • Aug 1 '19

Thank you for sharing that video!

Sanket Maru • Jul 31 '19

Hi Karina.
Good to know how its handled in Spanish. I wrote a blog post dev.to/sanketmaru/whitespaces-are-... on similar lines on how Angular handles i18n and some gotchas like whitespaces , names. Do check it out

Karina • Jul 31 '19

Thank you! I'll check it out

Koas • Aug 2 '19

Hi Karina, great article and very helpful to anyone interested in i18n for our beautiful language!

Also a trouble saver is setting the proper character encoding in the database to avoid problems with the spanish accented letters (áéíóúü) and the ñ.

For MySQL I'd reccomend utf8mb4_unicode_ci, since it's the only one that guarantees full UTF character coverage (even for emojis!). There's a great article about that here: mathiasbynens.be/notes/mysql-utf8mb4