Should units of measurement be localized?

Question

I am working on an app featuring some measurements entered by human operators. In the config section, an admin enters which measurements and which units they want to use, among other things. The kinds of units anticipated are very diverse and not able to be fully defined. So the plan is to let the admin enter the units in free-form instead of using a select box.

OK so far. But elsewhere, we are displaying the units when the app is localized into one of several different languages. The possible range of languages is known by the app from the beginning.

I'm looking for ideas on how best to handle the entering and displaying of units. I'm by no means a linguistic expert, but I imagine different languages have their own ways of representing the same units, which would imply that if we use free-form text entry, the admin would have to enter the unit's translation into each language. We do that with other kinds of text fields in the app, so it's not a huge problem from a coding standpoint.

But I'm wondering how others handle this kind of situation. It'd be a lot easier NOT to translate the units. But is that reasonable? FWIW, both the admins and the end-users of this system are typical consumers, not necessarily scientists or other analytic types. Also, we need to avoid having our software dependent on 3rd-party services like Google Translate.

Answer 1

The units themselves are partly culturally dependent, like metric vs. imperial vs. US units. If you intend to allow any units, you would in a sense carry out ultimate localization of unit: the individual user would decide on units. I suppose you would still recognize a finite set of units, somehow.

The symbols for units are a different issue. If SI units are used, their symbols are in principle the same across languages and cultures. But there are differences in practice; e.g., in Russia, it is normal to use Russian abbreviations (in Cyrillic letters) instead of standard symbols, e.g. кг and not kg. Moreover, if users can enter units by name, the names need to be localized (even though they tend to be similar, like meter ~ metre ~ Meter ~ metri ~ метр, they are not identical). And many non-SI units don’t even have standardized symbols.

So set of unit symbols or names recognized would need to be language-dependent.