by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/01/16 10:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/01/16/513098.aspx
That is right, the Unicode Consortium now has the Unicode 4.1 character charts in French!
The release from Unicode explains it better than I could, so I will quote it here (in English and French):
Unicode 4.1.0 Character Charts in French
========================================The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce the release on its Web site of the character charts for Unicode 4.1.0 in French.
The section of the site starting at http://www.unicode.org/fr/charts/ contains the complete set of these charts, covering all characters in the latest release of the Unicode Standard. The section contains navigation pages, a name index, a few information pages and of course all the charts in PDF format. The charts for versions 4.0 and 3.2 are also available.
These charts, like their English counterparts, contain not only a representative glyph for each character, but also the official name, as well as various annotations about usage, similar or dissimilar characters, Unicode decompositions, etc. The French names are those of the French version of ISO/IEC 10646 funded by the Canadian government. The translation of the annotations is mostly due to Patrick Andries, with help from François Yergeau, Alain LaBonté, Jacques André and several reviewers.
Tableaux de caractères Unicode 4.1.0 en français
================================================Le consortium Unicode est fier d'annoncer la parution sur son site internet des tableaux de caractères de la version 4.1.0 du standard Unicode.
La section du site accessible depuis http://www.unicode.org/fr/charts/ contient un jeu complet de ces tableaux, qui répertorient tous les caractères de la plus récente version du standard Unicode. On y trouvera des pages de navigation, un index par noms de caractères, quelques pages d'information et bien entendu tous les tableaux en format PDF. Les tableaux des versions 4.0 et 3.2 sont également disponibles.Ces tableaux, tout comme ceux de la version anglaise, contiennent non seulement une image représentative de chaque caractère, mais aussi son nom officiel ainsi que diverses annotations précisant l'usage, les caractères à rapprocher ou à contraster, les décompositions Unicode, etc. Les noms français sont repris de la version française de l'ISO/CÉI 10646 financée par le gouvernement du Canada, la traduction des annotations est principalement due à Patrick Andries, avec l'aide de François Yergeau, Alain LaBonté, Jacques André et plusieurs réviseurs.
This announcement did lead to some interesting speculation about other languages, and Patrick Andries (one of the people cited in above announcement) clarified the situation a bit with an opinion that several other people agreed with:
For programs using the UCD data format to load character information, we have made available the following "localised" file : <http://hapax.qc.ca/UnicodeData-4.1.0.fr.txt>.
As far as other languages, I feel that if they are approved by a standards body or a national body, these should not be discouraged and could be serve as a nice Unicode showcase (be that, for instance, Chinese, Hindi or Arabic).
The work that has been done for French is definitely a long-term effort (as proven by the fact that the French data hosted on the Canadian site have been up there for several versions of the standard!), and certainly other official efforts could well see the same results.
It is actually interesting to look at many of the translated names in such a situation, when so many of the names have no real meaning in English other than as a transliterations from some other language where the characters are used. If you are interested in seeing how that type of problem plays out in localization than I would definitely encourage you to take a look.
Anyway, enjoy! en français!
This post brought to you by "ç" (U+00e7, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA)