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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Really internationalizing
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
This post in the N=1 blog makes an excellent point about internationalized software:
Now the polite version had the following message when the person did not get the correct answer: "We are sorry that the clues were not very helpful for you. Please try the next game." I can see why some people might think they're being manipulated with such a message. In English, it almost sounds condescending - but of course this was in Chinese, so probably the impact of the message was different.
Which is an important point in itself: there are differences between various cultures, so don't expect that something that works for China would automatically work for North America, and vice-versa.
It's about more that just making message catalogs for different languages - you really have to have someone from the target region helping out. There's another way to deal with this, and I've seen it done with the picture management software that came with our Sony camera. Instead of translating messages, this application had none. Instead, it sports a large number of totally inscrutable icons on buttons. That's definitely not the way to go...
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