July 02, 2007

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Unicode

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, has been available for some time in close to 300 languages, although often only in the form of images of handwritten or printed text, not as proper text files. The Unicode Consortium has recently adopted the UDHR as a demonstration project and is facilitating the translation of the UDHR into more languages and making it available as ordinary text in several formats, particularly XML. You can view the results of their efforts and tables showing the status of work for various languages at the UDHR in Unicode website.

Unfortunately, this is the easy part. Getting governments to abide by the Declaration is a much harder task.

Posted by Bill Poser at July 2, 2007 09:59 PM