Translate: New Rails I18n Plugin with a Nice Web UI - Newsdesk developer blog
http://developer.newsdesk.se/2009/01/21/translate-new-rails-i18n-plugin-with-a-nice-web-ui/

save

So, use icons whenever possible on buttons, and if you must use text

Nice piece by Wil Shipley on localizing Cocoa apps, including his own clever technique for doing so without maintaining separate XIB files for each separate localization.

A list of the many challenges of internationalization. My favourite code-breaker is Russian pluralization: if you are saying "X new messages", then "messages" is spelled one way if X ends in 1, another if it ends if 2,3, or 4, and a third way if it ends in 5,6,7,8,9 or 0. I cannot imagine how annoying this must be to code.

It’s not always as simple as 'Just use Unicode'

'Let us start by looking at four main variables in the space : language, country, culture and technology. Language. Let us take that one first. How hard can that be? Well, what list of languages do you want to target? Please don't say "all of them". There is no such thing as a definitive list of languages and even if there was, the list of languages supported in Unicode changes across various incarnations of Unicode. Oh, and there are languages with unbounded sets of "characters" such as Chinese which literally cannot be fully described in Unicode.'

Some examples of why internationalization and localization are not as simple as "just use Unicode".

Nice explanation of the complexity of language support.

In this article we will skip through a bit of history and theory, then illustrate a neat hack called accent-folding. Accent-folding has its limitations but it can help make some important yet overlooked user interactions work better.

"Users pay attention to details in a site's writing style, and they'll notice if you use the wrong variant of the English language."

worth a glance, but it's the Brits' fault that they cannot spell things correctly. Use wrong size paper too!

Users pay attention to details in a site's writing style, and they'll notice if you use the wrong variant of the English language.

Unicode is a standard, UTF-8/16/32 are encodings.