What things should be localized in an application

Question

When thinking about what areas should be taken into account for a localized version of an application a number of things pop up right away:

• Text display
• Date and time
• Units
• Numbers and decimals
• User input formats
• LeftToRight support
• Dialog and control sizes

Are there other things/areas to remember or keep in mind when building a localizable application? Are there any resources out there which provide a listing of best practices not just for text localization but for all things around localization?

Answer 1

After Kudzu's talk about l10N I left the room with way more questions then I had before and none of my old questions answered. But it gave me something to think about and brought the message "depends on how far you can/want to go" accross.

• Translate text bodies with aforementioned things
• Test all your controls for length/alignment in LTR/RTL, TTB(TopToBottom) BTT and all it's combinations.
• Look out for special characters and encodings
• Look out for combinations of different alignments (LTR, RTL, TTB, BTT) and how they effect punctuation and quotation signs.
• Align controls according to text alignment (Hebrew Win has its start menu at the right
• Take string lengths into account. They can overflow in other languages.
• Put labels at the correct side of icons (LTR, TTB etc)
• Translate language selection controls
• No texts in images (can't be translated)
• Translate EVERYTHING (headers, logos, some languages use different brand names, product names etc)
• Does the region have a 24:00 or a 00:00 (changes the AM/PM that goes with it too)
• Does the region use AM/PM or the 24:00 system
• What calendar system are they using
• What digit is for what part of the date (day, month, year in all its combinations)
• Try to avoid "copying [number] files" equivalents. Some regions have different rules about changing words according to quantities. (This is an extremely complicated topic that I will elaborate on if desired)
• Translate sentences, not words. Syntax rules are too complicated to put in your business logic.
• Don't use flags for regions. Languages != countries
• Consider what languages / dialects you can support (e.g. India has a gazillion of languages)
• Encoding
• Cultural rules (some western images displaying business woman can be near offensive in some other cultures)
• Look out for language generalizations (e.g. boot(UK) != boot(US))

Those are the ones from the top of my head. The list just went on and on...

Answer 2

Don't forget the overhead of converting all documentation and help files.

Answer 3

a couple hints from my J2ME apps days:

1. don't translate separate words, translate whole phrases, even if there are matching repetitions. You'll later have to translate to a language where words have to be modified differently in different contexts and you may end up with an analog of "color: greenish"

2. Right2Lelf includes numbering of lists, alignment, and alternative scroll bars

3. Arabic languages write the same letter differently based on surrounding letters. You can't just print a string from a character buffer, you'll need a special control to output those or support from you platform

4. alphabetical sorting is HARD. No native Chinese could ever explain me the rules, but they will always spot wrongly sorted words. There appear to be a number of options to sort Chinese. I guess other languages may have the same problem