Localizing your app. Traps and pitfalls by Roman Imankulov

Localizing your app. Traps and pitfalls

Transcript

1. Localizing your app. 
 Traps and pitfalls Roman Imankulov
2. About me • taking care of localizing todoist.com since 2012
3. that’s how it looks like (18 languages in total)
4. that’s how it looks like (18 languages in total)
5. that’s how it looks like (18 languages in total)
6. that’s how it looks like (18 languages in total)
7. How to choose the language?
8. Ask user!
9. Get it from HTTP request
10. Get it from the URL
11. Get it from the URL
12. Get it from the URL
13. Confused search engines
14. Use hreflang
15. How translations are stored?
17. How to use them in the code?
19. Not touching the questions • How to seed translation files • How to extract strings from the code • How to work with translators • How to compile files • How to merge translations • etc…
20. String interpolations
21. Which one is correct?
22. String interpolation 
 strikes back
24. Try pofilter from translate-toolkit
25. Plural forms
26. Naive approach
27. Plurals are complicated in Russian
28. Arabic plurals Source: http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/latest/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html
29. ngettext to the rescue
30. ngettext to the rescue
31. More issues
32. Order of words in a sentence _(“%s assigned %s tasks to %s”) _(“{user1} assigned {n} tasks to {user2}”)
33. Gender variations _(“%s completed a task”)
34. String concatenations _(“Welcome to”) + website_name
35. Missing context _(“May”) pgettext(“month name”, “May”) pgettext(“availability”, “May”)
36. And many many more
37. What can we realistically do? • Brace yourself and get ready for failures • Use linters, automated tests, etc • Explain to developers how different languages work • Explain to translators how localization in the app works • Make sure there’s a communication channel between developers and translators • Make sure there’s a feedback channel from users to translators and developers