Internationalizing Desktop App within a couple years… What should we do now?

Question

So we are sure that we will be taking our product internationally and will eventually need to internationalize it. How much internationalizing would you recommend we do as w

Answer 1

IMHO, to claim something is going to happens "in a few years" literally translates to "we hope one day" which really means "never". Although I would still skim over various tutorials to make sure you don't make any horrendous mistakes. Doing correct internationalization support now will mean less work in the future, and once you get use to it, it won't have any real affect on today's productivity. But if you can measure the goal in years, maybe it's not worth doing at all right now.

I have worked on two projects that did internationalization: a C# ASP.NET (existed before I joined the project) app and a PHP app (homebrewed my own method using a free Internationalization control and my own management app).

You should store all the text (labels, button text, etc etc) as data inside a database. Reference these with keys (I prefer to use the first 4 words, made uppercase, spaces converted to underscores and non alpha-numerics stripped out) and when you have a duplicate, append a number to the end. The benefit of this key method is the programmer has a pretty strong understanding of the content of the text just by looking at the key.

Write a utility to extract the data and build .NET resource files that you add into your project for compile. Create a separate resource file for each language. In your code, use the key to point to the proper entry.

I would skim over the MS documents on the subject: http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/getwr/dotneti18n.mspx

Some basic things to avoid:

• never ever ever use translation software, hire a pro or an intern taking that language at a local college
• never try to create text by appending two existing entries, because grammar differs greately in each language, this will never work. So if you have a string that says "Click" and want one that says "Click Now", do not try to create a setup that merges two entries, or during translation, copy the word for click and translate the word now. Treat every string as a totally new translation from scratch