What is localization anyway?

re: What is localization anyway?

Ian — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 20:39:00 GMT

"Today is 2004/01/26 in Great Britain"

Small point: it's 26/01/2004. I've only ever seen the date the other way in relation to ISO. :-)

re: What is localization anyway?

Larry Osterman — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 20:44:00 GMT

Wierd - for some reason, I thought that the date order in the UK was y/m/d, not m/d/y.

But the point still holds - the date order's different in the UK than it is in the US.

re: What is localization anyway?

Ian — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 21:03:00 GMT

"But the point still holds - the date order's different in the UK than it is in the US."

Definately, I was just nitpicking the format (d/m/y). ;-)

In the past I've had to find a bug in a timesheet/expense LOB application where someone had changed the default database language from British to US English - and thus the parsing. As the interface code was using the users regional settings to display the date, strange things happened for a few days!

Localisation is hard. I doff my hat to all localisation teams everywhere!

re: What is localization anyway?

Crot — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 22:19:00 GMT

I've never understood why the US seems to want to make things different just for the sake of difference. There's no logic whatsoever in m/d/y - since when is any measurement written "mid-significance/least-significance/greatest-significance"? You don't see pricetags with "$26 and $2000, and 49c" or distances like "motel .5 and 7 miles ahead". Either use least-to-most (d/m/y) or most-to-least (y/m/d), don't just muddle it up because you want to be contrary toward every other country.

re: What is localization anyway?

Larry Osterman — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 22:33:00 GMT

"contrary toward every other country"? Um. Just about every country does this slightly differently. Bring up the regional options control panel applet and start scrolling down. There are countries out there that use HUGELY different orders for just about everything - I picked the easiest one (dates), there are others.

re: What is localization anyway?

AndrewSeven — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 23:22:00 GMT

I think the US format is based on how we say dates.
January 26th 2005 -> 1/26/2005
But some people will say 26th of January 2005.

It always seemed to make more sense to me to use d/m/y, from smallest to largest.
To remove doubt, whenever I can, I use the month name and not a number.

re: What is localization anyway?

David Candy — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 23:54:00 GMT

Yesterday was the 26/1/05 in Australia, and 235 years and three days ago Captain Phillip with the first fleet landed just south of me (and did't like it at botany bay so went to Sydney Harbour just north of me) and on the 26/1/1788 claimed Australia for Great Britain. It's called Australia Day here.

Why oh why don't MS programming languages recognise "colour" as a legal word. It would be so simple to make english language versions of their languages and they could be in the same version. It generates syntax error after syntax error. If I spelt colour as color at school I would still be repeating year 2 40 years later. In year 4 we would be beaten with a ruler for spelling color (Miss Tutt if anyone knows her address?). There's other things like this. And it's so simple to fix - accept colour or color.

re: What is localization anyway?

Andrew van der Stock — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:17:00 GMT

When I was at primary school some 20 years ago (gawd, I'm showing my age), I was told "spell it one way, and be consistent". So I spell in the US fashion (color, jail, program, -ize, etc).

It really irks me that anti-US types don't realize that the formalization of "-ise" endings and so on only really happened after the 1930's. Australia (and Britain) used both until around the second World War, and then suddenly stopped. For no reason.

I find it particularly difficult to understand many English accents on TV, whereas I don't have any trouble even with the deepest South US accent. Australian English, particularly in common spoken usage is far, far closer to US English than "British English".

I don't know why the nitpickers insist on archaic constructions such as "gaol" when they no longer use "connexion" or "to-day" (which Tolkien used as recently as the 1960's). Language is a living breathing entity.

As long as we all understand each other, it's good enough for me.

On topic, I'm currently refactoring a PHP codebase to support right-to-left languages and date forms. PHP is a nightmare to get localization / internationalization done at all. Things such as daylight savings alone cause hundreds of lines of code. O for culture and locale properties written by people who understand these things! .NET makes it so much easier.

Andrew

re: What is localization anyway?

Eric Lippert — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 01:25:00 GMT

Also, localizability is about more than just putting everything into a string table. Are your dialog boxes and other controls big enough to handle the French translation? French words tend to be longer than English words. Do you have bitmaps that contain text? Do you have bitmaps that contain pictures that make no sense in other cultures? (Stop signs, red lights, those yellow triangle caution signs -- not all of those are universal.)

Regular readers of my blog know that I'm a big fan of pseudolocalization. If I had my druthers, we'd all be dogfooding pseudolocalized builds every day.

"What is localization, anyway?"

JD on MX — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 04:45:00 GMT

is localization anyway?" href="http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2005/01/26/361015.aspx">"What is localization, anyway?" Larry Osterman of Microsoft has a good short piece on five different things that are each often called "localization": (a) localizability: designing an app to easily accept alternate text; (b) translation: actually providing...

re: What is localization anyway?

Dean Harding — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 02:13:00 GMT

I can get used to spelling "colour" as "color" (along with some of the other funny mis-spellings in the U.S. dictionary), but I just can't get my hear wrapped around that bizarre m/d/y date format...

Anyway, that's all completely off-topic, and I couldn't agree more with respect to incorrect use of the different terms. They all have very different meanings, but there're still too many people who use them interchangeably.

re: What is localization anyway?

Norman Diamond — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 03:32:00 GMT

> localizability is the process of extracting
> all the language-dependant strings in your
> binary [...]

That's only part of it. You start by going through files looking for Japanese strings and pulling them out, but that isn't enough. After translating all the strings to (usually) English, the default locale and default fonts display the translated results perfectly, but if you deliver the result to a customer in (fairly often) an English-speaking country then the program fails because the customer's system sees an application's request for a Japanese locale or fonts and the customer's system doesn't have those installed. In addition to translating the words, you have to set the locales and fonts for display of the words you've translated.

And while doing that, you have to avoid setting the locales and fonts for display of words that you haven't translated. If the program gets strings from the OS, or filenames from disk, etc., they'd better be displayed the way the user's system ordinarily displays them. Even the "PrivBar" from one of your colleagues doesn't do that, (and of course tons of applications and drivers from other vendors), and it's not exactly possible to guess what the thing was supposed to display.

1/26/2005 12:39 PM Ian

> I've only ever seen the date the other way
> in relation to ISO. :-)

And in the world's largest country by population, and in other countries near that one.

re: What is localization anyway?

PaulH — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 03:32:00 GMT

well, never seen these sorts of definitions before. coming from a web app (coldfusion and java) environment, you seem to be splitting/mixing some pretty commonly accepted definitions. i would have thought that i18n was the process of making an app locale neutral (text and date formatting as you mentioned, but also stuff like number formatting, calendars, GUI layouts, etc.), l10n was the process of translations, etc. for a specific locale ("skinning" it if you will) and g11n was the process of moving your i18n app across many locales via repeated l10n. i've never seen g11n only associated w/politics except maybe in the field of economics/trade. in fact, i recall seeing g11n & i18n being used almost as synonyms on the dr. international website.

i do agree though that machine translation is for the birds. try round-tripping something like "this side towards enemy" thru translation s/w to see the potentially dangerous issues.

re: What is localization anyway?

Larry Osterman — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 05:03:00 GMT

Gah, I hate the i18n, l10n, and g11n terminology. Why on earth are people so unwilling to type the silly letters?

Anyway, Paul, you may be right. I ran the text past the GIFT team at Microsoft before posting and they didn't have problems with my definitions. And there's a really critical distinction between globalization and internationalization. There needs to be a step somewhere in the process of supporting multiple cultures that involves meta-information - it's not the information in the text strings, it's not the order of dates&times. These issues are almost always involved in political issues, and not technical - national boundaries, time zone boundaries, country/province names, etc. I'm using globalization to refer to that specific aspect of the "world-ready" problem - there needs to be a word to reflect that part of the process, which goes beyond the mechanics of supporting multiple cultures.

re: What is localization anyway?

John Walker — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 07:16:00 GMT

It's very funny how we all cannot get past what we already know. Just as the UK and Aussies cannot get past the m/d/y format the US uses, I always mess up the customs form when traveling to the UK or elsewhere, always writing my DOB as m/d/y. Creatures of habit I guess. Also, although it always seems odd to read, when I see the term "colour" or "favourite" I think it's so cool looking.

Larry, cool post. Thanks for clarifying. As a developer, these are the things that I know I have to deal with, but truly hate to think about because it makes my brain hurt.

JW

re: What is localization anyway?

Michael Kaplan — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 09:22:00 GMT

These definitions certainly cover the basics in understanding the concepts, and I am sure that any smart person can extend each one as needed based on that understanding. Certainly it is enough information to contrast the different concepts.

The primary point that inspired your article (which did get lost here in the conversation!) is that LOCALIZATION is not a word that can be used for all of these concepts. Not unless you want to be incorrect....

re: What is localization anyway?

Adrian — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 15:57:00 GMT

Whatever you want to call it, making a software product ready for another market is much deeper than string translation, date formats, and other surface details.

I spent a long time working on popular financial applications. While they weren't huge successes in other countries, there were a few localized versions here and there. I don't remember one minute of worrying about the trivial issues everyone here seems concerned with. Our problems were things like:

1. A currency so devalued that we could not represent a typical net worth in a 32-bit integer.

2. An accounting product in the UK couldn't be sold unless it enforced certain accounting practices that ran contrary to the "empower the user" approach of the original US version.

3. Some tractor-fed A4 forms in Germany are a tad longer (or shorter?) than standard A4 so they can work with old printers that only advance in 1/6 inch increments. Many of the printer drivers didn't realize that, nor would they accept a custom form size from the application.

4. Some common form sizes in some countries could not be exactly represented in the units allowed by the Microsoft printer driver (10ths of a mm, if I recall). No big deal when printing on blank paper (slight drift over long documents), but horrible placement when trying to fill in boxes on pre-printed forms.

5. Compound interest is computed in different ways in different countries.

6. There's no reliable way to count "business days" in places where holidays are set by decree rather than algorithm.

Making sure your translatable resources are separated from your code is easy in the face of problems like this.

re: What is localization anyway?

JMW — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 16:44:00 GMT

Why isn't there just a single term for "making software 'work' anywhere in the world?" Just for convienence's sake?

re: What is localization anyway?

Larry Osterman — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 17:31:00 GMT

JMW, good question, and I'm not sure I've got a good answer. The simplest answer I can come up with has to do with the fact that there are three separate items involved in the process - resources, code, and politics.

Most people just use internationalization or "making products "world ready"", whatever that means.

re: What is localization anyway?

Norman Diamond — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 02:54:00 GMT

1/27/2005 7:57 AM Adrian

> 1. A currency so devalued that we could not
> represent a typical net worth in a 32-bit
> integer.

Oh neat. Well surely no one who ever programmed a computer after Germany's or Hungary's experiences in the early 20th century would ever think of using a 32-bit integer for such a thing. (Sarcasm of course, but not aimed at Adrian of course.)

> 5. Compound interest is computed in
> different ways in different countries.

And in different ways in different departments of the same bank.

> 6. There's no reliable way to count
> "business days" in places where holidays
> are set by decree rather than algorithm.

Such as varying by which department of my employer? Sometimes the border between these places is virtual instead of real.

And for whoever mentioned daylight savings time, that of course depends not only on country and municipality, but also varies from year to year. Backward compatibility ensures that there will never be an unambiguous way to compute times.

re: What is localization anyway?

melissa — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 20:18:00 GMT

Thank you for the excellent article. Being in testing, and having to deal with all of these in the past, its nice to see a well-thought out description.

re: What is localization anyway?

Michael Kaplan — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 08:47:00 GMT

In response to JMW's thought about a single term for "making software 'work' anywhere in the world" --

The core name of the "subteam" I am on is the NLS team -- and many of us would joke (since people assumed that we were localizers even though we were about internationalizstion) that NLS stood for "Not Localization, Stupid!"

I have an analogy that no one else likes, but I would tell people that internationalization is like being a proper guest in someone's house -- knowing when to say please and thank you, or how to format the dates, or whatever. Localization is about making yourself at home.

Like I said, I have yet to find someone who likes this analogy. But I think it does point out the difference between the two....

re: What is localization anyway?

Guenter — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 16:13:00 GMT

I often see "automating translation" on the wishlist of software companies, but I strongly believe there is nothing like that in the near future.
One of the oldest jokes out of automatic translation in germany is "in der mode der schnörkelfesselung" (in scroll lock mode) from the mid-80s, where just the dictionary suggested the wrong translation.
But there are much simpler things, like I noted today in some freeware-tool:
"No" and "No" are two totally different words (negation versus number)...
Misinterpretations lilke that are even present in today's MS apps (though I haven't one at hand)...
So at least proofreading the whole app is still the clue to truely localized software.

re: What is localization anyway?

Ryan — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 07:06:00 GMT

I believe they write the date 2005/02/14 in Sweden, and maybe other continental European countries.

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