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Hold my place
As I've said before, context is king. If I don't know what I'm localizing or how the strings will be used, my translations will probably be wrong. That's why short strings are hard, and that's why strings with placeholders can be tricky too. Placeholders Read More...
Posted 26 April 05 09:20 by jesperh | 0 Comments   
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What do we actually localize?
Oskar Johansson asked in a forum a Swedish community web site ( http://www.pellesoft.se/communicate/forum/view.aspx?msgid=161248&forumid=134&sum=0 ) how we localize. The question was roughly: What is the current translation model? Are all localizable Read More...
Posted 15 April 05 02:54 by jesperh | 1 Comments   
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Localization Bugs: String length limitations, #4
This post will be pretty long. It's mostly just an old fogey reminiscing about them good ole days, so if you just want the meat of the content, feel free to skip down to the last few sentences. The first big project I localized was Windows 2000. That's Read More...
Posted 23 December 04 12:42 by jesperh | 2 Comments   
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Localization Bugs: String length limitations, #3
Last time, I gave a couple of examples how even if you use safe coding practices, localization might still break your code. Of course, the problem wasn't really that you used strncpy instead of strcpy, the problem was the string length limitation itself. Read More...
Posted 16 December 04 10:55 by jesperh | 0 Comments   
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Localization Bugs: String length limitations, #2
Let's continue on the topic of string length limitations. I showed yesterday an example of how a string length limitation might lead to truncated text. That's not pretty, but it's not too bad either. At least nothing is broken. Only truncated text isn't Read More...
Posted 15 December 04 11:29 by jesperh | 2 Comments   
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Localization Bugs: String length limitations, #1
I've written ten posts or so about the most common bugs I see in localized software - duplicate hotkeys and clipped text. We try hard to avoid these bugs, but realistically they are present somewhere in almost all software. And not just Microsoft software Read More...
Posted 14 December 04 02:20 by jesperh | 1 Comments   
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Localization Bugs: Clipped text, #5
I'll show one final clipping. Just like the last one, we have a case where the text in a control is added at runtime. The main difference between this one and the last is the hints I get when I localize. Consider this dialog box in shell32.dll, as seen Read More...
Posted 08 December 04 11:00 by jesperh | 1 Comments   
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Localization Bugs: Clipped text, #4
I've shown how a resource that looks fine to me can still be clipped at runtime, if for instance the font or font attributes change. I don't actually see this happening all that often, save for in Wizards. It's far more common that the text of a label Read More...
Posted 07 December 04 09:51 by jesperh | 1 Comments   
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Localization Bugs: Clipped text, #3
Yesterday I showed how things that change in runtime can cause bugs. The wizard example isn't that challenging, since it can be predicted fairly easily. Today, I'll show something that's just a little bit trickier. Here's a dialog in the Accessibility Read More...
Posted 24 November 04 09:12 by jesperh | 0 Comments   
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Localization Bugs: Clipped text, #2
Yesterday I showed some bugs that really shouldn't happen any more. Easy to avoid, easy to detect. Today, I'll show something a little bit more interesting. My favourite localization tool is altogether not too poxy, but it's not great at predicting what Read More...
Posted 23 November 04 09:28 by jesperh | 0 Comments   
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Localization Bugs: Clipped text, #1
About as common as duplicate hotkeys are dialogs with clipped text. And just as with duplicate hotkeys, there are a couple of different ways these can happen. I'll show a few examples, starting with the most trivial case. One note before I start: I will Read More...
Posted 22 November 04 08:29 by jesperh | 5 Comments   
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Localization Bugs: Hotkeys, #5
One more example of duplicate hotkeys and then I'll let it go. Five is enough. A lot of applications are distributed as MSI files. From the user's point of view, an MSI file is just a series of "Next" buttons just like any other wizard. From a localizer's Read More...
Posted 19 November 04 11:26 by jesperh | 0 Comments   
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Problems with getting Telnet access on localized Windows
As I mentioned last week, a Swedish community site has been set up. It's already producing results. One user posted about a pretty ugly bug in the Telnet help. In short, in the Telnet help, under then heading "Telnet server access", the text says: 3. Read More...
Posted 15 November 04 10:23 by jesperh | 3 Comments   
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Localization Bugs: Overlocalization, #1
"Overlocalization" happens when you translate something that should not have been translated. Overlocalization can give all kinds of interesting symptoms and often causes problems that are tricky to diagnose. Ideally, anything I see in my databases when Read More...
Posted 11 November 04 09:41 by jesperh | 0 Comments   
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Localization Bugs: Hotkeys, #4
Another area where we see entirely too many duplicate hotkey bugs is in the MMC snap-ins. MMC, Microsoft Management Console , is pretty cool. It was implemented to give developers a handy frame work for building management tools, which in turn makes it Read More...
Posted 10 November 04 10:48 by jesperh | 0 Comments   
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