Few days ago Joel Spolsky announced a launch of German version of FogBugz. I guess the reason was to spread the word but he wrote one very important thing about internationalizing applications:
“To ensure that every string is localizable, our developers translate everything to Pig Latin first before handing it off to the German translators.”
I think it’s worth underlining. It’s the old trick to change every string in the application to something which is understandable by translators and yet it allows differentiating easily translated texts from not translated ones. One method is Pig Latin (I guess Fog Creek developers had a lot of fun while preparing the Pig Latin version). Another is adding, on the beginning of every text, a character which isn’t used in strings presented in the app (probably something from the latter half of ASCII table).
Thanks to this, you won’t accidentally leave words which has a meaning in both languages unchanged. You can also test, before starting translation process if every single piece of text is extracted form code and put in some kind of external resource. Every prompt which isn’t Pig-Latined or doesn’t have this little trashy thing on the beginning is probably a bug.
When talking about German, there’s another issue – German words are statistically longer than English ones. This can be an issue when you have fixed position of controls on windows. To fix the issue without changing all the windows you can use different font – more narrow one.
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