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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 profile image
Lito

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 :)

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aminmansuri profile image
hidden_dude

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

You can never know these days how many people have.

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lito profile image
Lito

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.

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aminmansuri profile image
hidden_dude

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.

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lito profile image
Lito

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

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robledokari profile image
Karina

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.

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hangouh profile image
Hugo Hernández Valdez

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

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robledokari profile image
Karina

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

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david_ojeda profile image
David Ojeda

🇲🇽🤘🏼

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hangouh profile image
Hugo Hernández Valdez

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

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ulitroyo profile image
Uli Troyo • 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:

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:

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robledokari profile image
Karina

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

Thank you!

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andres profile image
Andrés Pérez

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

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ulitroyo profile image
Uli Troyo

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.

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andres profile image
Andrés Pérez

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

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robledokari profile image
Karina

Thank you for sharing that video!

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sanketmaru profile image
Sanket Maru

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

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robledokari profile image
Karina

Thank you! I'll check it out

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koas profile image
Koas

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

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Juan Carlos

Muy bueno amiga.

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robledokari profile image
Karina

¡Gracias Carlos!

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salcidogrijalva profile image
Salcido Grijalva

Muy buen articulo.

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robledokari profile image
Karina

¡Muchas gracias!

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robledokari profile image
Karina

Thank you Yuma!

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david_ojeda profile image
David Ojeda

¡Muy buen post! i18n siempre ha sido un tema muy interesante para mi.

Keep 'em coming!