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