A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

When I was in Japan I did proof reading for a Japanese feature phone. A major Japanese brand, actually. That was really comical. There was an Australian guy for English, an German guy, an Italian lady, and me for French. What they did prior to the meeting is: * translate from Japanese to English by Japanese people with a poor English level (maybe the software engineers actually) * translate from weird English to other languages by translators who had only…

That is a very good article. One architectural takeaway suggestion I've learned over the years, which is not obvious when reading that article: "You should not assume that you can generate any part of any string visible to the user without the full context." Whenever you design a localizable application, it isn't enough to provide a string that can be translated. You have to allow for delegation to the most specific piece of code dealing with the string, because only…

Localisation is one of several cases where I've come to the conclusion that frameworks that are supposed to help you end up doing more harm than good. What you really want is to express a bunch of functions that conform to a common interface: you pass in a number of files and a number of directories and you get back a user-facing string. But we already have a very well-optimised system for expressing functions: whatever programming language we're actually working…