Best Practices for writing software to be consumed internationally (i18n)

Question

I am looking for opinions from experts that have written software consumed internationally. I would like to understand the best practices people have employeed at each logical softare layer (Data (rdbms), Business (middleware), User Interface).

Thanks for any help you can give.

Answer 1

Data

• When you go to UTF-8, be prepared for characters to take up to 3 bytes each (in the case of Chinese), which means that VARCHAR(20) now needs to be a VARCHAR(60).
• Unless you really have a good reason to do it, for the love of god, don't store your UI translations in the DB.

Business

• Spend a lot of time on requirements. As a starting point, take a screenshot of every single screen in your app, put it in a document, and start drawing boxes around things that need i18n support. Then map each of those boxes to an area of code that needs to change.

UI

Don’t

string foo = "Page " + currentPage + " of " + totalPages;

Do

string foo = string.Format("Page {0} of {1}", currentPage, totalPages);

Why? Word Order Matters.

<value>Page {0} of {1}</value>
 <value>{1}ページ中の第{0}ページ</value>

Nothing is sacred in the UI Even something as fundamental as showing green for positive numbers and red for negative numbers is fair game.