How to Be the Best Parent to Your Soon-to-be-Born Global Software App

It took you years to make the decision, and it wasn’t one made lightly. One day you took a deep breath, doodled some plans, and ran the idea by a few close friends. Then, you told your significant other about your feelings and you started working on it. Soon, you’d give birth to the software app of your dreams and you’d launch it globally! But, wait a second, where is the parent manual for delivering an app that is world-ready? We have it here.

Making your software product global means breaking the language and culture barriers that borders pose, and that is what software localization is about. But before localization can take place, a software application needs to be made world-ready, or, as techies love to say, “internationalized”. In short, you need to adapt the application (and ideally any associated documentation or by-products) so that it satisfies the requirements of the different local markets in scope, or even better, plan for a way to support all possible locales.

The internationalization and localization process is only successful when the appearance and functionality of the software make the user feel like it was designed specifically for them, rather than for another person.

Introduce Localization Early in the Baby App Diet

Once you’ve decided to become a parent, you’ll immediately want to add helpful items to your diet. Vitamins or power bars? Double espressos or energy drinks? Soylent or kale salad?

In addition, you’ll also want to add localization very early on in the design stage of building your baby app. While traditional translation tends to be done retrospectively (that is, when the product or content is already final), due to the complexity of a software product the process is best applied during the initial design of the program.

• To anticipate potential problems and provision as needed during the design stage is much (exponentially) cheaper than attempting to rectify issues later down the line.
• Incorporating localization solutions into the design phase will improve the integrity and security of the software product, reducing the need for updates and patches to repair unanticipated issues.

Designing the Baby App’s Room

Creating a safe and intellectually rich environment for the baby app is capital. In the same way, when incorporated early in the design of an application, the following factors will significantly facilitate localization once it’s ready to arrive in the world. This list is by no means exhaustive but serves to highlight the need for a comprehensive awareness of how and where errors are likely to occur during localization.

• Any textual content within the program that will require translation should be separated from the programming code and stored in resource files. A translated version of these files can then be supplied for each locale. This is much more efficient than attempting to sift through and scrutinize lines of code later to make adjustments.
• Expansion of text is particularly important when designing the length of text fields for input and output. Failure to account for the variation in word and sentence length between languages during translation, which can be between 40 and 100 percent, can result in lost data. There will also inevitably be a negative effect on the appearance of the user interface. It is within the program designer duties to aim to declare appropriate length for data strings to account for the additional length.
• Text fields either for input or the display of output information should not be included as part of the sentence structure. It is likely that such a structure will no longer make sense following translation.
• Images, graphics, and icons should be treated in the same way as text and be included within resource files rather than integrated into the program code. This way images and graphics can be selected with cultural sensitivity and deployed by selecting an appropriate resource file.
• Avoid concatenation of strings because the structure in one language may not be correct in another. Let’s take the example “black” + “horse”, which while correct in English would become “noir” + “cheval” when translated into French, introducing an obvious grammatical error, since in French the adjective typically follows the noun (as opposed to the “adjective+noun” formula in English).

Make Sure the Stroller Fits in Your Car Trunk 

After all the research you did, all the advice you had to listen to and endure, and after waiting weeks for your stroller to arrive, it’s simply very bad news when you realize that it doesn’t fit into your car trunk. 

Well, learning about any of the following after your application is ready or close to ready, could be just as devastating:

• Though Unicode, particularly UTF-8, has become a widely spread standard, it is still possible that a program will have to interface with systems that use a different encoding. To provide a solution, most programming languages have conversion libraries available. For this contingency to be successful, however, requires awareness at the design stage of the potential encoding of other systems that the program may run into.
• Locales contain different formats for the representation of numerical data such as dates, times, and currencies. Again, modern programming languages utilize libraries that can take care of detecting these formats and applying the corresponding equivalents. This is probably one of the most critical factors to consider when designing a program for the diversity of the world. Even though many users could struggle through a poorly translated interface but yet be able to use the product, failing to adapt dates or currencies can lead to catastrophic results (just imagine missing your kid’s debut on Broadway, or not showing up at a critical meeting with a new big client in Japan, just because someone failed to localize the date or time properly). Clearly, it is paramount that during the design phase of a program, a keen eye is kept on the possible effects of the various local format requirements.
• Equal care should be given to the localization of program support, this includes online help and user guides. It is particularly important that the labeling of context-sensitive help is consistent with that of the software, any discrepancy here will cause confusion and may render the information unusable.

Get the Best and Most Experienced App Childcare

As a specialist in software translation and localization Venga can provide tools and services which are invaluable in the design and nurturing of your newborn software products to ensure they are effectively optimized for localization. 

Like planning for a baby, the localization process requires time-consuming research and analysis. By taking on the legwork (and swaddling), Venga will utilize their expertise and experience to provide an effective fast track to quality software localization solutions.