Best practices for internationalizing web applications?

Question

Internationalizing web apps always seems to be a chore. No matter how much you plan ahead for pluggable languages, there\'s always issues with encoding, funky phrasing that doe

Answer 1

In my company all our strings are stored in *.properties files. Our build tools build a "test languange" copy of the properties files, which replace a string like this:

Click here

with something like this:

[~~ Çļïčк н∑ѓё ~~ ﾀｳ ~~]

Now, when we set the language to "test" in our config files, these properties files are used. (And of course we don't ship the test language files).

This allows us to:

1. Make sure that Unicode characters are displayed correctly, including Japanese/Chinese/Korean.
2. Make sure that the layout scales appropriately for languages with longer words (German in particular has longer words on average than English).
3. Spot any hard-coded strings (as they will be in plain-English).

As for the actual translation, this is done by professional translators, not developers.