Volunteer Spotlight!

Lorna Evans, SIL International

Lorna first became involved with Unicode in 2000 as a conference participant. Her enthusiasm led her to volunteer as a lecturer at a Unicode conference, and for the past several years as an active proposal contributor and committee member. Lorna’s heart and passion are to assist digitally disadvantaged communities by bringing their language fonts, characters, and sounds to the Unicode standard. 

Lorna began her language journey typesetting Bibles in Ethiopia in 1990 and was fascinated by the multiple fonts and characters needing representation. When she heard that Unicode was moving to support Ethiopic characters, she had to get involved. 

When asked what she is most proud of, Lorna said, “Anytime I do a proposal to Unicode, it feels like the most important thing (for that language community).” She thrives on research and feels with each proposal, she is bringing digital access to people who need it most. Lorna is completely self-taught and currently focused on documenting Arabic script. She describes SIL International, an Associate member of the Unicode Consortium and her current employer, as the former kings of creating custom encoded fonts and she is working diligently to help SIL transition to Unicode.

As for her time involved with other Unicode staff and volunteers, she has enjoyed the camaraderie and attending technical committee and editorial meetings. Lorna is an active member of the Script Ad Hoc Subcommittee, as well as the primary representative to Unicode for SIL International.

Lorna shared that she grew up in Bolivia and says that salteñas, a savory pastry filled with beef stew, is still her favorite food. 

Editor’s Note: We appreciate and thank Lorna for taking time to tell us a little about herself as well as her years of contributions 

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Finally, if you are already a contributor — or member of Unicode (or your company or organization is), thank you, Danke, děkujeme,  धन्यवाद, merci, 谢谢你, grazie, நன்றி, and gracias! What we accomplish is only possible because of supporters like you. 
 
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider 
adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. 

As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. 

Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

Make your adoption today!

Unicode Consortium Board Votes to Elevate ICU4X to Technical Committee

Across the globe, people are using alternative ways to get online, such as smartphones, smart watches, and other compact devices. Formed as a Subcommittee of the ICU Technical Committee in 2020, ICU4X is a modular, lightweight, and secure library that brings internationalization to client-side and resource-constrained environments, written in Rust with bindings into many programming languages. 

“We are all very excited about the ICU4X project. It dramatically expands the number of apps and systems that can easily deploy internationalization: with a smaller, modular footprint and the advantages of security and performance from Rust.” — Mark Davis, Co-founder and Board Chair

At its July meeting, the Board agreed that the ICU4X Subcommittee needed to have the authority to make technical decisions relating to the ICU4X architecture, structure, and coding, and voted that the ICU4X Subcommittee be elevated to the level of Technical Committee with the authority to make such decisions, effective immediately.

The ICU4X Technical Committee will be responsible for the design and implementation of the library, with the goal to ensure that mobile devices and other low-resource devices can access scalable internationalization services. It is particularly applicable for devices that cannot run full ICU (C/C++ and Java) — and for those in emerging markets with more limited resources and digitally disadvantaged languages.

Chair Shane Carr (Google) and Vice Chairs Zibi Braniecki (Amazon) and Nebojša Ćirić (Google) are the ICU4X Technical Committee Chair and Vice Chairs.

Congratulations to the ICU4X team! 

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Support Unicode
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

Unicode Technology Workshop — Call for Submissions and Registration Open!

Save the Date! November 7-8, 2023. Bay Area (Hosted at Google)

About the Workshop

Join us in person for two days of community building around the Unicode technology that makes software work for billions of people. Expect two days of workshops, seminars, free-form discussions, and lightning talks centered around i18n libraries, locale data frameworks, globalization tooling, localization pipelines, input methods, and text rendering. Network with the developers and users to help shape the future of Unicode technology.

This is a new type of event for Unicode, with a focus on building more connections within the internationalization community. Expect to come away with deeper knowledge on how to solve tough problems in the i18n and l10n space and how to engineer products that work better for global users. GILT professionals, especially those who build or use Unicode technologies, are encouraged to attend and to host sessions. To encourage maximum collaboration amongst the attendees, this is an in-person-only event.

Register Now

Call for Submissions

For those interested in participating in and contributing to the event, the call for submissions is now open. If you work on Unicode internationalization technologies or use Unicode internationalization technologies in your work, we want to hear from you. You can register your interest in contributing using the following link.

Call for Submissions

About the Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is the premier non-profit open source, open standards body for the internationalization of all software and services. 

For more than 30 years, the Unicode Consortium has coordinated the efforts of a world-wide team of volunteer programmers and linguists to standardize, evolve, and maintain a global software foundation that allows virtually every computer system and service to help people connect using their native language. 

For additional information about Unicode, visit home.unicode.org.

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Support Unicode
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

622 New CJK Ideographs to be Available in Unicode Version 15.1

The Unicode Standard will include 622 new CJK characters in Version 15.1, which will be released on September 12, 2023. The characters are in a new block, CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I, with code point assignments as reflected in the proposal document.

The characters in the Extension I block have been deemed to be very urgently needed for use in China. The Extension I proposal was based on characters that appeared in a draft amendment of China’s mandatory GB 18030 standard. For this reason, the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) considered it imperative to arrive at a stable encoding for these characters as quickly as possible.

With the Unicode 15.1 beta review period completed, and with endorsements from liaison partners, China Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2, UTC at its recent meeting was able to commit to including these characters for this next release of the Unicode Standard. The code point assignments are now stable, and vendors can begin working on implementations with confidence.

The Unicode Consortium would like to thank experts in UTC’s CJK & Unihan Group and ISO’s Ideographic Research Group (IRG) for their expedited work in preparing a proposal for encoding CJK Extension I, and would also like to thank Mr. Chen Zhuang and partners in CESI for their cooperation in this process.

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Support Unicode
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.