What do American developers get wrong about internationalization?

Comments

[Ghost]

1.) They forget that non-QWERTY keyboard layouts exist

2.) RTL-languages usually break the UI completely or at least look very out of place

3.) They forget that some cultures don't use , for thousands or . for decimals.

[Mike Simons]

They assume all languages pluralize like English.
unicode.org/cldr/charts/29/supplem...

[Bryan Baldwin]

They forget to do it, until they try to take it into other countries.

[Patrick Tingen]

They forget that in some languages most words are longer than in English

[Enno Rehling (恩諾)]

Encodings, encodings, encodings. I'm considering "Explain Unicode" as an interview question.

[naor volkovich]

They should either support RTL-layout from day 1 or not support it at all! When you use a program and then an update comes out that supports RTL-layout, it's just the worst! Everything you used to click on the right is now on the left and the opposite! We prefer to have LTR-layout then getting used to a new one!

[Kirill Myshkin]

English

// 1  : thing
// >1 : things

Russian

// 1        : штука
// 2 to 4   : штуки
// 5 to 20  : штук
// 21       : штука
// 22 to 24 : штуки
// 25 to 30 : штук
// 31       : штука
...

[Ahmed Mahmoud]

Arabic

// 1  شيئ
// 2 شيئان
// 3 أشياء

not to mention that Arabic is gender-sensitive language

[Gabriel PREDA]

Romanian

//   1        : tigru    [ tiger ]
//   2 to  19 : tigri    [ tigers ]
//  20 to 100 : de tigri [ tigers ]
// 101 to 119 : tigri    [ tigers ]
// 120 to 200 : de tigri [ tigers ]
...

The formula for PO files we use is:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=3;plural=(n==1?0:(((n%100>19)||((n%100==0)&&(n!=0)))?2:1))\n

[David Stancu]

What about "barosane"?

[Tamir Bahar]

I'll try and give some actual examples I encountered, without naming names.

1. i18n is applied almost everywhere. So you can use non-Latin letters in content, but not in search or tags.
2. To support RTL, the devs decided to flip the entire UI. Text included. This makes no sense whatsoever.
3. Images, or image editors, are flipped to support RTL. Resulting in unusable displays.
4. System language is used for some parts of the software, where a user configured language is used for the rest. So RTL layout is used with an LTR language, or vice versa.
5. Semantic similarity between languages is assumed. So duplicate UI strings are only translated once. This causes really silly UI with words such as "set" and "read", when different tenses are mixed up.
6. Date-time formats are abused. Both DD/MM/YY vs MM/DD/YY, and 24 vs. 12 hour clocks. Often you can even set those settings, but only for some displays. Being unable to tell which times are shown in different places in the UI is absolutely terrible.
7. Fonts. If you support a language, support its display as well. And support it all over your program. Also, if your text inputs allow for more than one language, make sure you have a font for every language enabled at the same time. MS Office does a great job at it.
8. Keyboard shortcuts. It is not uncommon that I have to switch back from Hebrew to English to type a keyboard shortcut. This is especially annoying for Undo. And really, all I care about is key locations. I don't want Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+ז to act differently.

There is one more, but I admit it is more difficult as there is no obvious solution

1. BiDi text. I often mix English and Hebrew. No code editor handles that well.

[Ben Halpern]

Guilty of a lot of this, but really excited to improve.

[Michael Scott Shappe]

We don't do it at all!

[Aurélien Hervé]

They require a "state" field in their forms.

[Oliver Bock]

Oh. How I hate this. (I'm from Germany and here no one ever asks this)