You are developing an application or website and you plan to have it available in many other languages. This means you are going to localize your product. Great! Alchemy Catalyst will be your key tool doing all the heavy work automatically. But even the best tool on the market cannot guarantee an easy and successful localization project if it has not been internationalized.

What is Internationalization, commonly referred as L18n?

An application or website is Internationalized if it can support being translated in any language for any country. This means the code can support different languages, such as double byte characters in Japanese. It supports different formats in dates, currency or gender. It can accommodate longer translations and all the user facing text is correctly resourced out for localization tools to parse. (Parse = read the localizable contents only)

Catalyst will be key in reviewing your project for potential internationalization issues. Using the Pseudo Translate Expert gives you the ability to apply automatic translations to your project files and test the translated output in a QA environment, before you send any file to a translator. Issues found in testing the pseudo translated files can be avoided in advance of testing multiple languages and thus are fixed once rather than reported separately in each language. It also gives an opportunity to report back to the developers on any internationalization bug which needs to be fixed to localize the project.

This is a list of pointers and most common checks to avoid countless localization issues and produce a quality product ready for the global market.

 

Don't hardcode formats

Localising a project will take Text

Resource all localizable strings

Text

Include all punctuation to the localisable strings

Text

Use UTF-8 encoding (where applicable)

Text

No concatenation

Text

Check file format and syntax is suitable for you localization tool

Unique IDs?
Parsing possible?

Variables

Like first name and last name
Place holder part of localizable string

Space for text Expansion

Text

Full locale

Text

Language support

Double bytes

Right to left