Internationalising a product is not just translating it to another language, it is a bit more complex than that. Before you can start to have your software localised and your documentation translated you need to think about a number of things.
- Internationaliation is integrating localisation into your product's source code. How to display other languages than the one it is written in? How best to do this with minimum of rewriting of the existing code and, at the same time, make it easy to add other languages later?
- You need to define a system for your locale strings, that is, all the individual items appearing on the screen, for example, menu items, actions, window titles, message texts, are identified as what they are. Otherwise, especially if the source is English, this can lead to complications and bad translations. In English, a menu item and a window title may look exactly the same, in French or German, however, it is most probably translated differently.
- Do you only intend to provide European languages or do you need to preview support for non-Latin characters as well, such as the Asian or Arab languages?
- Not only do you need to think about displaying other languages, but also how they may change your user interface. The most common challenge is text expansion. If the source is in English, and you are translating to German or French, you have to take into account that the translation can be up to around 35% longer than the original. If you are providing for example Hebrew or Arabic languages, they are displayed from right to left. You need to take this into account when creating your user interface, for example in popup windows and message boxes.
- Have you thought about the regional differences, such as date formats, sizes, units, examples, etc?
- Does context-sensitive online help need to be provided? If yes, the same questions and decisions apply as for localising the online help.
I can help you find the perfect way to internationalise your software. Perfect in this case means with the least cost to the development team and the most cost-effective and easily maintainable way to actually translate to different languages and be able to easily add more languages later on.
I work closely together with my customers during the whole internationalisation, localisation and translation process. This interactive process, fine-tuned during years of experience, guarantees the best results.
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Getting confused with these terms, internationalisation, localisation, translation? Read my blog.