When generating messages for software users, the general practice is to assemble them at runtime from a library of sub-strings. These truncated strings are nearly impossible to translate with any degree of accuracy. The translated version of the software cannot combine these strings grammatically at runtime. A translation vendor will ask your programmer instead to rewrite these strings into messages which make sense independently.



Potential Problems with Gender

Here is a recent example from the coal face: We were localising a DLL file for a large electronic document management software. Since the organisations the software was aimed at tend to use their own vocabulary for everything that is related to electronic documents, the developers thought it was a good idea to implement a naming feature, which would allow users to rename about every noun used in the interface.

While it seemed like a great idea, it caused a lot of problems. For example, the developers had wrongly assumed that nouns in foreign languages have no genders influencing adverbs that belong to these nouns. After all, in English adverbs never change: whether you talk about a new record or a new archive, the word "new" always stays the same.

For example, in Dutch, "a new archive" is "een nieuw archief" while a new record is "een nieuwe record". In Dutch, the words for archive and record have different genders, meaning that the preceding adverb is inflected.

Now, this entire program was full of strings like "new %s"; since the developers simply assumed that "new" could be replaced by the same word regardless of the word represented by "%s"

This meant that all of these strings had to be rewritten - at a very high cost!

Differing keyboards

In many other countries, keyboard layouts differ from the US keyboard layout. The use of punctuation keys as shortcuts should be avoided, since these may not work the same on keyboards abroad.

Most applications feature various keyboard shortcuts. For example, Copy and Paste in both Windows and Linux is Ctrl C and Ctrl V.

These keyboard shortcuts are in many cases assigned on a mnemonic basis - Ctrl P for Print, notably. However, this is different in other languiages - in German, for example, the shortcut for print is Strg D.

If there are shortcuts in the menu, then the menu command must have corresponding text; for example, Copy Ctrl C. Any changes in the shortcut table have to also be made in the menu definition which corresponds to them. Keep in mind that the keyboards for other languages don't always match up with US keyboards. Even in the cases that they do, the character produced may differ. When one presses Shift 8 on a US keyboard, this creates an asterisk. However, these same keystrokes simply make an 8 on a French keyboard.