One thing is if the database can handle Unicode, but what about employees? They now need to be able to differentiate Chinese characters as well as Sanskrit, Hangul and Thai script?
Of course not.
Airlines have pretty paved the way for everyone having an ascii encodable version of the name and this is so standardized that it’s even in your passport.
I find it laughable that airlines are given as a shining example of operational excellence.
I think parent makes a point about employees. You can argue all you want that it is reasonable to accept and store any unicode character, but it is in no way reasonable to expect that the person on the other side of the glass to know every single script in the world, and every single unicode character.
Your position is reasonable for those people entering their own name, on their own device, which is configured to their own language - a system should not fall over on that - but that is not the use-case presented by the parent.
> I find it laughable that airlines are given as a shining example of operational excellence.
They're certainly doing it better than anyone else, IME.
The use-case is "employee has to enter the name, on their device, with their keyboard". What's your better alternative, the one that makes you use words like "absurd" and "laughable"?
After all, this use-case is not going away anytime soon.
Whether we like it or not, having a name with uncommon characters is going to make your life difficult in those cases where your name has to be entered on a device and keyboard that is non-native to you.
The point of identification is to identify people to some level of trust. In the vast majority of cases, that means that I should know that you’re the same person that I did business with yesterday.
Airlines need to tie you to an official document, which is much more complex. They do a pretty decent job at it considering all of the stakeholders who make that happen.
The hang-wringing about American hegemony is a projection of some other nationalist feeling. The constraints of Hollerith cards made it difficult to accommodate different character sets and the accommodations are codified in international treaties and business process. It will improve over time, probably first in the more cosmetic CRM side.
Accepting customers and accepting character sets or glyphs are two very different things. Accommodation is a two way street - if your name on the Starbucks cup is in Arabic or Greek, the barista in the US isn't going to be able to call it out. That not because the barista is some ignorant rube, they just don’t speak Greek.
The magic is we have a global system where many people have the ability to step in a plane and go almost anywhere and immediately conduct their business or pleasure with minimal friction. One of the friction points are issues like character sets, or poor accommodation of long names, etc.
It is not a technical issue but a social one.
Also, let's not forget the context here, we're talking about a bank not a restaurant
Because sometimes other people have to read it. Do you actually expect your bank has someone who can read Νίκος Καζαντζάκης and 刘慈欣 and ᠲᠠᠲᠠᠲᠤᠩᠭ ᠠ and משה ברבי מימון הספרדי and ᐱᔭᐃ ᐊᕿᐊᕈᖅ? (Or even notice which one Chrome doesn't render correctly? — Edit: I probably shouldn't blame Chrome; it's fine on his Wikipedia page.)
That's even more absurd. So now, just because I don't speak Thai, I should reject all Thai customers, since I can't read their names?
I really don't see what's absurd about that. This website is so English language biased it's hilarious.
Btw we're talking about banks not Starbucks or mom and pop shops
As is most international websites. And systems. And content, in general.
It's a sad fact of life that, as we sail into a globally-connected future, the world is going to consolidate on a small number of languages, and the majority of languages are going to be left behind, discarded, and eventually die out.
People want content. They will learn whatever language gets them the most content. Right now almost all content is produced in a small handful of languages, with (in the west) English being dominant.
At this point it looks like English[1] is going to be in that small set of surviving languages.
It's inevitable. Railing against it is a pointless waste of energy.
[1] My home country has 11 languages, all official. Until widespread internet arrived it was common to find locals who could not speak English. Now, I'd be hard-pressed to find non-english speakers, even in the very outlying areas.
Sure, as long as you are prepared to be sued for discrimination.
Not even an English/US thing, this is the Latin script from Roman times.
It's not even standard for English: there's a UK keyboard that is organised differently and has different characters.
And even if they know how to type in all 52 letters, it's absolutely not a given that they are able to transliterate from their native script to the English alphabet.
"Everyone, everywhere" does not have a "Latin" alphabet as the basis.
- There is no such thing as a "standard keyboard"
- Not everyone can type Latin alphabet
- Almost nobody can read, speak, hear or write latin, and it makes no sense to "hear latin alphabet". How do you pronounce "Bordeaux" using only your knowledge of the Latin alphabet? How do you pronounce "Queue" using only your knowledge of the Latin alphabet? You realise native speakers of various languages will pronounce words (for example "pain") and even letters (for example "w", "j", "y") very differently? Etc. My name is pure ASCII and every foreigner pronounces it very incorrectly (even though all the sounds exist in the English language already, just mapped to different letters).
- Not every country is related to the Roman culture.
Your statement isn't even remotely true.
Let’s set aside everyone which is illiterate. There isn’t even a single way to speak the Latin alphabet, as pronunciation depends on the language. I have a hard time believing there aren’t people who can only read and write in their native non-Latin alphabet.
I don’t know what you mean when you say everyone can hear the Latin alphabet. Listening to sounds has no relation to the language spoken. I can hear Korean just fine, doesn’t mean I understand the meaning of the words or understand their alphabet.
> Not even an English/US thing
It is common for languages which use the Latin alphabet to have diacritics and characters not present in ASCII.
Edit: what do you suggest as a universal alternative for bit-perfect verbal communication... Spelling out Base64 Unicode over the phone?
The Latin alphabet does not have a single pronunciation. And the vowels are ambiguous across the most common languages so you can't even make an argument that they are intelligible.
You've really lost the plot on this one.
The clerk answers in and speaks Classical Latin.
So I suspect that the ruling really is that the bank should use a system that allows to correctly write the country's official languages, which seems quite reasonable.
Now under EU laws this would probably extend to EU languages, with the likely caveat that, I think, different alphabets are expected to be transliterated into the local one. E.g. Greek names are expected to be transliterated into the latin alphabet in Western Europe.
I am pretty sure that there is no expectation that people can use their names written in, say, Chinese characters as that is not reasonably legible.
You can just put a note on the account: "Actual name contains accent acute over second e of first name: our system is unable to render this. User is quite sensitive about this so apologize again for our inability."
Not every organization would require this, it depends on the processing. A bank would since it sends you a bunch of correspondence. A restaurant taking a reservation wouldn't if they wouldn't save and sell the information or use it for marketing.
Naturally, maybe the goal is just to get this train moving somehow.
The airlines get their data feeds from the travel reservation systems – the ones we (or the travel agent) interface with via the airline website or a dedicated web portal. There are two major global ones, Amadeus and SABRE (there are other ones as well). I do not know how any of them interconnect, though.
There have been numerous attempts to modernise both (including rewrites from scratch), and all the attempts have failed so far due to the complexity of the logic: calculating the most optimal travel time for connecting flights in a multi-leg trip is, like, very hard, apparently + applying a correct airfare prices based on the selected itinerary and a myriad of other variables. Subsequently, there has been the decades' worth of growth of the said logic – there was an epic story on here some years back about one such endeavour (I think it was an Amadeus rewrite).
From what I remember, the character encoding was not even considered to be a problem in that endeavour – as in «acknowledged, is trivial to solve, now let's move on onto the actual problems».
No. But it's one thing to not support Japanese the other not to support apostrophes or accents in text written in latin characters
But guess what was also incompatible with this? ASCII. Hence the é things in HTML
You can fix this if you encode it