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Discussion on: What do American developers get wrong about internationalization?

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punio4 profile image
Ivan Čurić

1) Translating strings without context. Google is notorious for this. For instance, in the Android Google app, "Search Language" is translated as "Language Searching" in Croatian.

2) Address fields: No, I don't have states.

3) Time/Date formatting: AM/PM + MM / DD / YYYY. Assuming that my week starts on Sunday.

4) Keyboard shortcuts assume you're using a US keyboard. It's not just the Y character position that's the issue, but other characters such [ ]< >: ; _ and the likes which are on another layer.

5) Forcing languages based on IP address. No, I don't want to read the gimped, half-assed local version of the site. Doing redirects is even worse.

6) Pluralization is dead easy in English, however it's often much more complex in other languages. Same goes for cases, which don't really exist in English.