Internationalization in your projects

Question

How have you implemented Internationalization (i18n) in actual projects you\'ve worked on?

I took an interest in making software cross-cultural after I read the famo

Answer 1

Some fun things:

1. Having a PHP and MySQL Application that works well with German and French, but now needs to support Russian and Chinese. I think I move this over to .net, as PHP's Unicode support is - in my opinion - not really good. Sure, juggling around with utf8_de/encode or the mbstring-functions is fun. Almost as fun as having Freddy Krüger visit you at night...

2. Realizing that some languages are a LOT more Verbose than others. German is a LOT more verbose than English usually, and seeing how the German Version destroys the User Interface because too little space was allocated was not fun. Some products gained some fame for their creative ways to work around that, with Oblivion's "Schw.Tr.d.Le.En.W." being memorable :-)

3. Playing around with date formats, woohoo! Yes, there ARE actually people in the world who use date formats where the day goes in the middle. Sooooo much fun trying to find out what 07/02/2008 is supposed to mean, just because some users might believe it could be July 2... But then again, you guys over the pond may believe the same about users who put the month in the middle :-P, especially because in English, July 2 sounds a lot better than 2nd of July, something that does not neccessarily apply to other languages (i.e. in German, you would never say Juli 2 but always Zweiter Juli). I use 2008-02-07 whenever possible. It's clear that it means February 7 and it sorts properly, but dd/mm vs. mm/dd can be a really tricky problem.

4. Anoter fun thing, Number formats! 10.000,50 vs 10,000.50 vs. 10 000,50 vs. 10'000,50... This is my biggest nightmare right now, having to support a multi-cultural environent but not having any way to reliably know what number format the user will use.

5. Formal or Informal. In some language, there are two ways to address people, a formal way and a more informal way. In English, you just say "You", but in German you have to decide between the formal "Sie" and the informal "Du", same for French Tu/Vous. It's usually a safe bet to choose the formal way, but this is easily overlooked.

6. Calendars. In Europe, the first day of the Week is Monday, whereas in the US it's Sunday. Calendar Widgets are nice. Showing a Calendar with Sunday on the left and Saturday on the right to a European user is not so nice, it confuses them.