‘e-Learning Localization’ Archives
International symbol, icon blunders can be avoided
Some of my European colleagues still remember when the old Macintosh operating system of the 1980s used a trash icon that Apple’s European users confused for a postal box. Why was the icon confusing? People across the globe have different cultural ideas and assumptions about what things are supposed to look like. In other countries, trash cans [...]
Color Meanings Can Be Lost and Found in Translation
We often consider only the connotations of colors in our own culture; however, colors carry various different – often strong – connotations in other cultures. What may be neutral in one country could carry sharp political connotations in another. What may be seen as positive in one culture may be negative in a neighboring country. For this [...]
Avoid Copying and Pasting
Limiting the number of human touch points in a project will limit the possibilities of introducing human error. One way to limit the number of human touch points is to avoid copying and pasting text whenever possible. Sometimes it can not be avoided. However, one important way to limit copying and pasting is to work with and extract [...]
Avoid Hardcoded Image Text
Just as it is more expensive to recreate a file from a PDF than it is to localize the original editable files, it is also more expensive to recreate an image with text than it is to localize editable image text. For this reason, it is important to limit embedding or hardcoding of text in images. This is an important element of [...]
Unicode Benefits
At one time or another, everyone has seen a page of multilingual text that will not display correctly. "Garbage characters" (also called Mojibake in Japanese) are rendered using encoding that does not match the original, and the result is unreadable. In other words, the application that wrote the text used a character encoding that said a [...]
Internationalization Benefits
Localization is not only translation, but also adaptation for a particular locale. If your website, software, online course, or other product requires localization, you should internationalize it first to avoid costly and time-consuming re-engineering. Internationalization is preparation that ensures your localization process will be [...]
Golden Rule of Localization
Former German Chancellor Willy Brandt once said, "If I am selling to you, I speak your language. If I am buying from you, dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen." In other words, then you must speak my language, German. This might be considered "the Golden Rule of Localization," to localize for buyers as you would have sellers localize for you. [...]
Browser Language Detection and Automatic Redirection
Browser language detection is often used to automate global navigation on a multilingual website. The browser language preference is automatically detected by the website so that the visitor can be automatically redirected to the language version of his choice. In many instances, this enhances the user experience more than manual language [...]
Internationalized Domain Names
Are you already localizing your website content into other languages? Consider doing the same to the website URL. Consider acquiring ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) like ".de" and ".es" for your multilingual website. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has recently approved non-Latin ccTLDs. Prior to this [...]
Language and Country Codes
Many multilingual websites are organized using subdomains and subdirectories based on language codes or country codes. These are usually ISO codes. See the following example that Google gave for a French website in Canada using the alpha-2 code for the French language: French language code subdirectory: www.example.ca/fr French language code [...]
