Localize This!
Building software for distribution on the internet opens your product up to almost everyone on the planet, but here’s the catch… this limitless pool of potential customers don’t all speak your language. This is exactly where Localization comes in.
In theory, localization is the conduit for you to reach all of these customers, but if you thought it was as simple as running your texts through Google translate or sending some strings to a translator, you’d be wrong. There are so many more steps to consider.
Larger companies will usually have a dedicated localization team, so that engineers or developers don’t necessarily need to worry about all of the ins and outs. That said, there are still a number of things you need to think about as well as ways that you can affect (read: improve or destroy) the localization process and the impact that you have on users who don’t speak your source language, regardless of whether you are working on back-end or front-end. You don’t need to be a polyglot to have a positive impact; here are just a few tips and things you can do to optimize localization from the developer’s perspective:
- Out of Sight, Out of Mind
It’s a simple but easily forgotten rule: Follow the localization process set-up by your teams.
While it’s a good idea to automate the fetching and receiving of translations to relieve the burden of manual labour, it also means you don’t necessarily need to think about localization when you are writing and deploying your code. At the same time, though, it’s important that you don’t forget about localization. This could mean anything from wrapping your text correctly so that your automation actually works, making sure your localization client is installed, or simply bearing in mind that whatever text you create needs to go into whatever languages your product is offered in, and remembering to add some time at the end of your project cycle to ensure your strings are translated. Remember, for each of the languages your company localizes into, 1 or even 2 pairs of eyes need to work with those texts, and this process can take anywhere up to a week. Similarly, it’s not a great user experience to just deploy in English and expect the translations to catch up. Something as easy as adding a step to your pre-deploy checklist to ensure the localization is done correctly can save A LOT of time and hassle later (believe me, I know!)
2. Grammar Pitfalls
Ah, grammar. It was everyone’s worst nightmare, trying to stay awake sitting through those boring language classes at high school. The problem is, while it was far more fun to spend your time looking up the swearwords in the French dictionary, those grammar topics are things that might come back to haunt you now. But don’t worry if you lost your German textbook or skipped your Spanish homework, here are the things that can affect the localization of your product:
2.1) Prepositions
Prepositions are a nightmare. Words like in, on, at, to, from, until and many, many more will normally exert a big influence on the word that follows. It may be that they cause the following word to go into a different case (such as in German, Russian, Finnish…), or it may be that your target language uses a different word from your source. The best tip: Avoid breaking your strings up and using “preposition + variable” constructions, and your translator will thank you!
2.2) Objects
As with Prepositions, the lack of cases in English makes it quite straightforward to code. As with prepositions, the object can change in different circumstances. In English, word order is pretty fixed and goes:
SUBJECT VERB OBJECT
I (subject) wrote (verb) the code (object)
Easy peasy! Except, anything that goes in that third position, the object that the verb is acting on, especially in German, is going to have problems with the word changing, so again be careful when using variables as an object in the sentence!
2.3) Articles and Gender
The good news is that some languages don’t have articles (woohoo, one less thing to worry about)! The bad news is that if you send the word “the” to be translated on its own, you’re in trouble. Whilst a Russian translator would be scratching their head because their language doesn’t have articles (ie “a” or “the”), in other languages they have either two (French le/la) or three (German der/die/das) depending on the gender of the noun, as well as the number (see 2.5). So even though in English “the bread” is pretty straightforward, in Russian it’s a masculine word without “the” in front of it хлеб, while in German it’s neuter “Das Brot,” and in French it’s “le pain.” This may not seem like a big deal, especially if you avoid splitting the article and the noun, but it can cause problems especially when considering that….
2.4) Adjectives and word order
….adjectives behave differently depending on what gender the noun is. Simply asking for the word “New” from translators isn’t going to work out, because there are two, three or many different forms depending on what the adjective is describing (What gender is it? Is it near a preposition? Is it plural or singular?). Similarly, especially in French, sometimes the adjective comes after the word it’s describing. What does this mean? Definitely don’t send adjectives in isolation for translation and be flexible with the word order in your sentences. This tip about flexibility in word order can also be useful when wrapping your text in formatting or inserting hyperlinks.
2.5) Numbers
One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes, four. Easy, right? Except in Slavic languages like Russian and Polish, where having more than four potatoes has a grammatical impact. How does that work? Well, 2–4 potatoes behave one way (4 ziemniaki), but 5–20 potatoes behave differently (5 ziemniaków in case you were counting), and then 21–24, 25–30 and so on. Confused? Don’t worry, your translator knows the difference, but make sure you give them the chance to translate this correctly by being flexible with numbers and accommodating multiple plurals into your code. Your Czech translator and their potatoes will thank you, however many there are.
2.6) Vocabulary and Homonyms
English has a very rich, literary vocabulary, but that doesn’t mean you can’t run into problems translating. Imagine the humble word “Save” — seems fairly easy as the button to save your data, but what if those crazy guys in marketing are running a campaign to “Save Money!” (Those guys in marketing are so crazy!) Suddenly, it’s not quite as easy as you thought, given pretty much every language around the world uses a different word for “save your data” and “save money.” The solution: Context! Your translator can give you the different meanings, as long as you help them out by telling them which meaning you want.
2.7) Character Counts
So your design team told you a particular button can only fit 30 characters. That’s fine, but don’t fill up your character count in your English copy. English words are quite short, and while your Japanese or Korean characters will also likely fit easily (remember, in these languages 1 character usually equals an entire word) most other languages need at least 20% extra characters. So if you were, hypothetically speaking, a blogging website and you needed a “Publish” button, fixing that button at 7 characters isn’t such a great idea when you localize it, unless you enjoy inflicting fragments of words on confused German or Russian speakers….
3) In general, and I cannot emphasize this enough, context and communication are king! You’re on the same team and you’ve got the same goal, so even though helping your translators may seem like a pain in the bum, but it will pay off in the end. Share plenty of screenshots and help with how the words will be used and where they will appear, as well as responding when they ask you something.
Scaling your localization through automation is a great way to grow your business, but simply sending texts away, crossing your fingers and hoping for the best isn’t going to cut it. You’ll get away with it once or twice, but know that eventually you will likely end up presenting your users with poorly translated junk. It’s not your fault, and it’s not the translators fault, but thinking about what you’re writing and opening a dialogue with your language nerds, whether that’s translators or your friendly localization team, can help you get it right, so that you can start turning those potential users into actual customers, whatever language they speak and wherever they are in the world!
