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

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tmr232 profile image
Tamir Bahar

I'll try and give some actual examples I encountered, without naming names.

  1. i18n is applied almost everywhere. So you can use non-Latin letters in content, but not in search or tags.
  2. To support RTL, the devs decided to flip the entire UI. Text included. This makes no sense whatsoever.
  3. Images, or image editors, are flipped to support RTL. Resulting in unusable displays.
  4. System language is used for some parts of the software, where a user configured language is used for the rest. So RTL layout is used with an LTR language, or vice versa.
  5. Semantic similarity between languages is assumed. So duplicate UI strings are only translated once. This causes really silly UI with words such as "set" and "read", when different tenses are mixed up.
  6. Date-time formats are abused. Both DD/MM/YY vs MM/DD/YY, and 24 vs. 12 hour clocks. Often you can even set those settings, but only for some displays. Being unable to tell which times are shown in different places in the UI is absolutely terrible.
  7. Fonts. If you support a language, support its display as well. And support it all over your program. Also, if your text inputs allow for more than one language, make sure you have a font for every language enabled at the same time. MS Office does a great job at it.
  8. Keyboard shortcuts. It is not uncommon that I have to switch back from Hebrew to English to type a keyboard shortcut. This is especially annoying for Undo. And really, all I care about is key locations. I don't want Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+ז to act differently.

There is one more, but I admit it is more difficult as there is no obvious solution

  1. BiDi text. I often mix English and Hebrew. No code editor handles that well.
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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Guilty of a lot of this, but really excited to improve.