Internationalization is Hard
Posted: October 23, 2009 Filed under: Computers, Sofware Engineering Leave a comment »Either that or programmers are lazy. I’ve been working on an App at work that requires internationaliztion, and until you get used to doing it, its very easy to let strings just leak through. I just installed Google Chrome, and right there on the first prefs page is a whole slew of I18n bugs: 
They missed a translation and another couple don’t fit in the space and just run off the page into oblivion. These bugs are annoying to fix, but at least they are easy to find: Just change the locale on your computer while you develop. Only one person on the team really needs to do this.
I have my computer’s language set to spanish, so I notice these problems right away while testing, which is certainly something you should do for at least a round of QA before you ship, but preferably while you develop. You can make it fun if you write a pirate locale or something, but you should absolutely be running your app in a language other than english before you can even come close to calling it finished.
