Localization 101

It may seem simple at the beginning but localization of your website may become overwhelming. You may have thought that all you needed to do was translating from English into the target language but it goes much beyond that. In addition to translators, you will need to have engineers and in some cases designers involve in the process. These tasks, however, can be simplified, if not avoided, in most cases if you plan ahead of time and develop for an international audience from the beginning.

While you may not be thinking about targeting foreign speakers when you start your business or the effort for new application, having localization in mind from the very beginning will make your life much easier and will avoid unnecessary expenses in the future.

Recently I participated in a seminar organized by Oregon Software Association and briefly talked to a group of business owners who consider localization or are in the process of localizing their website into other languages. There are many other topics and details that I would love to have covered but due to time limitations, I had to come up with a very short but comprehensive presentation. The result was a short presentation about

• Why to localize?
• When to localize?
• Writing for an international audience (avoiding metaphors, composite strings etc.)
• Designing for an international audience (text expansion, graphic localization)
• Developing properly internationalized code (hard-coded strings, sorting, units of measurement and internationalization related issues)

The presentation is available here in pdf format

Localization Basics - 1.8MB