Usually, when software developers create messages for end users, they have them assembled at runtime from a set of substrings stored in a library. A truncated string such as the ones used are almost impossible to translate accurately, since there is no way of ensuring that they will be properly combined to be grammar compliant at runtime. Translation vendors will ask programmers in many cases to rewrite all of these strings into messages which make sense to the end user independently.

Beware of Gender

Here’s just one example: While they were working to localise a DLL file for a large electronic document management software firm, the developers on the project decided to use a naming feature to allow users to change the names of nouns used in the program, as many companies have preferred terminologies for documents and elements within them.

This looked like a good idea, until the developers realized that unlike English, most languages assign genders to their nouns which alter the adverbs preceding them. In English, of course, nouns are uninflected; but in other languages this is often not the case. Where we would say “new” no matter what the noun we meant to qualify with it, this isn’t applicable worldwide.

But not in Dutch. A “new record” is “nieuwe record”, while a “new archive” is “nieuw archief”. Note that the “e” behind “nieuw” (new) has disappeared. This is simply because the word “archive” has another gender in Dutch than “record”, which is reflected in the adverb preceding it.

The entire program was filled with strings along the lines of “new%s”, on the assumption that “new” could be replaced easily, no matter what word “%s” represented.

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

Different keyboard layouts

Keyboards in other countries also differ from the US or English keyboard. Avoid using punctuation character keys as shortcut keys, because they are not always found on other-language keyboards.

In many applications, there are keyboard shortcuts. The standard shortcut for Copy and Paste, for instance is Ctrl C and Ctrl V. Other common shortcuts include F5, Alt F8 and so on.

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 a menu lists shortcuts, then this menu command should have corresponding text which also will need to be translated. For instance, Copy: Ctrl C. If any changes are made in the shortcut table, these should also be reflected in the menu definitions.