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Agreed. On the last product I worked on we had a custom UI with no translation/internationalization support and we ended up spending a total of 2 or 3 person-mo

Agreed. On the last product I worked on we had a custom UI with no translation/internationalization support and we ended up spending a total of 2 or 3 person-months adding the capability. But then there was also a huge amount of time we had to spend also giving the translators sufficient context to translate the UI because we kept getting inconsistent translations. And there were conflicting regulatory requirements for labeling and units in some places that we had to handle by displaying different assets. We came to the conclusion that we could have spent a month implementing a tool for the translators and probably saved 2 or 3 months of back-and-forth and screenshotting. While it's technically practical to architect for translation and internationalization, it's frequently out of scope for a first version of most products. If you're selling something for the US market, it's difficult to justify bumping your time-to-market to add support for something that you won't need for your first release. And that's not getting in to the additional complexity that it adds to the software system to have that support. It's difficult for me to take someone seriously when they're making statements about internationalization not requiring any additional resources. It just tells me that they have no experience in any of the fields where it does require additional resources. And reading the article, I can see that the "experts" are all from web development companies where there's a framework that exists and you don't have to worry about justifying your use of Software of Unknown Pedigree to an auditor. Or where it doesn't really matter if your translation or internationalization framework doesn't work 100% of the time because it's unlikely to kill someone if a control on your UI is labeled incorrectly.

cco 8y ago
>It's difficult for me to take someone seriously when they're making statements about internationalization not requiring any additional resources. I don't think is the intended meaning of the quote. Based on the rest of his response it sounds like he's saying, "Non-English speaking customers matter just as much to us and as an organization the default should be 'support i18n from the start'." If your default is "we must support languages other than English" then it isn't really "extra work", it is just core functionality.
- hartator 8y ago
  Not sure why something can’t be extra work and a core feature at the same time. Security, privacy, or accessibility are also core features for some startups but they add more work. Hell actually an accessible website is easy for Google translate to automacily translate, you might avoid doing i18n yourself completely if you have limited resources.
  - cco 8y ago
    >Not sure why something can’t be extra work and a core feature at the same time. This person is the chair of the internationalization team at W3C, their phrasing is intentionally trying to shift the perception from "extra work" to "default work". Yes, it is more work if you ignore it but the person is trying to change that perception because inside organizations "extra work" is what you cut to make a deadline.
baybal2 8y ago
GTK and QT were handling all-in-one localisations for 2 decades with middle eastern languages, Chinese, Indic languages, and pluralisation without the need making localisations into standalone versions. That was once done by amateurs more than 2 decades ago. Today it pains me seeing Android and Windows devs hardcoding texts letter by letter whenever they need to do more than bare basics with text layouts or handle different Chinese locales. I think where Qt/Gtk succeeded and commercial software failed is the accent on making localisations legible over them "being pretty."

cco 8y ago

>It's difficult for me to take someone seriously when they're making statements about internationalization not requiring any additional resources. I don't think is the intended meaning of the quote. Based on the rest of his response it sounds like he's saying, "Non-English speaking customers matter just as much to us and as an organization the default should be 'support i18n from the start'." If your default is "we must support languages other than English" then it isn't really "extra work", it is just core functionality.

hartator 8y ago
Not sure why something can’t be extra work and a core feature at the same time. Security, privacy, or accessibility are also core features for some startups but they add more work. Hell actually an accessible website is easy for Google translate to automacily translate, you might avoid doing i18n yourself completely if you have limited resources.
- cco 8y ago
  >Not sure why something can’t be extra work and a core feature at the same time. This person is the chair of the internationalization team at W3C, their phrasing is intentionally trying to shift the perception from "extra work" to "default work". Yes, it is more work if you ignore it but the person is trying to change that perception because inside organizations "extra work" is what you cut to make a deadline.

baybal2 8y ago

GTK and QT were handling all-in-one localisations for 2 decades with middle eastern languages, Chinese, Indic languages, and pluralisation without the need making localisations into standalone versions. That was once done by amateurs more than 2 decades ago. Today it pains me seeing Android and Windows devs hardcoding texts letter by letter whenever they need to do more than bare basics with text layouts or handle different Chinese locales. I think where Qt/Gtk succeeded and commercial software failed is the accent on making localisations legible over them "being pretty."