Internationalization Cookbook
This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.

An internationalization checklist

Intro

This is something I have tendered for a long time. It is not the first, it is probably not the last. It is also not very original (just in how many can you say “don’t hard-code the strings” and “use Unicode”?). Most of the items are (should be?) common knowledge. And yes, it does overlap with other checklists out there.

But I have organized it according to my own perspective. I have used it for desktop and server applications, on all kind of platforms, for development, for testing, and what not. So I think it is pretty universal.

Like any checklist, it is a reminder. It does not teach you anything. You have to know what the bullets mean, and whenever start a new application, or add a new feature, or write a test plan, you can go thru it and make sure you did not miss anything.

And it also helped me get some order and structure when I have attacked a new project. And I am thinking to use it (again) to give some structure to my site. I am thinking about taking each bullets, explain it, and then give some possible solutions using different frameworks (Win32 API, Mac OS X APIs, POSIX, Java, ICU4C, ICU4J, ActionScript, PHP, JavaScript, maybe others).

So, here it is.


I18N checklist

Data processing

  • Unicode, encodings & code pages
  • Any application language – any data language – any OS language
  • File system access, path names
  • File formats (all language editions can read one another’s documents)
  • Communication protocols, network, URLs
  • Interoperability
  • Indexing, searching, etc.
  • The locale info is not frozen

Content

  • Features important to international markets are included
  • Text and messages are devoid of slang and cultural references
  • Consistent and correct terminology is used in strings
  • Language negotiation

Locale/Cultural Awareness

  • Sorting & string comparison, search
  • Text conversions and categorization (case and others)
  • Working with individual characters
  • Number formatting
  • Currency formatting
  • Date formatting
  • Calendar differences
  • Time formatting
  • Time zones, daylight saving time
  • Addresses
  • Personal titles
  • Telephone numbers
  • Measurement Units
  • Paper and envelope size
  • Punctuation, separators
  • Spell-checker or thesaurus/dictionary
  • Text to speech, speech recognition, OCR
  • Parsing, validation
  • Input, Display & Output
  • Layout and text rendering
  • Honoring the system / user settings
  • Fonts, font linking, font fallback
  • Decoration, colors, icons, graphics, sound, voice, animations, video
  • Keyboards and IMEs
  • Input validation
  • Passwords
  • Shortcut-key combinations are accessible on international keyboards
  • Characters boundaries, word and line breaking, hyphenation
  • Complex scripts
  • Vertical scripts
  • Console globalization
  • Clipboard
  • Printing

Localizability

  • Isolate localizable resources
  • Concatenation, variables
  • Buffers are large enough
  • Do not reuse strings
  • Provide context for translators
  • Mark non-localizable strings or characters
  • String handling
  • Mirroring
  • UI Considerations
  • Hard-coded size, coordinates, alignment
  • Runtime resizing / moving / hiding
  • Custom resources
  • 3rd party components

Development and deployment

  • Same code base, language structure, building
  • Single executable model
  • English is just another language
  • Plug-and-Play language support / MUI
  • Installation / deployment
  • Modularity
  • Patches
  • SDKs
  • Support for locale-specific hardware
  • Electronic payment
  • Tech support

Legal issues (still fuzzy)

  • Encryption restrictions
  • Comparative advertising
  • Registration
  • Taxes, finances
  • Privacy, personal information handling
  • Freedom of speech
  • “Politically correct”
  • Local legislation
  • Using ®, © ™
  • DRM

One comment to “An internationalization checklist”

  1. lili says:

    The check list is very useful. Is it possible to have the explanation with example for each of them to make it more understandble? Especially for the people who doesnt know i18n so well:). Thanks.

Leave a comment