A View from the Street

Over the years I have used different sources for translations including fully-ISO9001 companies with great auditing and reviewing processes all the way down to friends, my high-school French, and BabelFish
I’m a manager of application development and ultimately responsible for the quality of the localization work. I’ve wanted to somehow have a basic [...]

What if an end-user wanted to change a translation in the field?
There are resources on the Internet that describe a framework to replace the “hundreds-of-RESX-files” solution with a single, custom file that holds all translations. End-users can edit this (huge) file, so the problem is solved, but developers will have a rough time of [...]

Localizing console applications is a simple concept, but unlike Windows Forms and other types of projects in Visual Studio you get no help at the start of a console application. VS just creates Properties, References and Program.cs with not much there in the way of structure.
Without any undue discussion, here’s the skinny on doing [...]

In a past article, I referred to the Reverse Dead Key Layout to make entering international characters easier for those of us in the U.S.A. that need é á ç ¿ and ä pretty regularly.  Here’s the rub: the original link to wikiupload seems to be not working, and I can’t find the original copy [...]

op quiz: which of the following are invalid in paths and file names?

That’s “back quote”, “apostrophe”, “double quote”, “open/close single quote”, “open/close double quote” and “open/close French quotes” (my term) at the end of line two. We are familiar with programs like MS Word that turn those first three characters into the four after [...]

The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed 2008 to be the International Year of Languages.
UNESCO has setup several areas where language research and education can improve people’s lives, increase information sharing and so on.
Get Involved
UNESCO featured site: Freelang.com [article] forums on translation, free hints, short translations and such, free dictionaries and a clearinghouse for translators [...]

On a recent trip to Sesame Place in Pennsylvania (U.S.A.), we spotted a wall mural showing some of the local versions of the show in different countries. Notice the complete lack of “familiar” characters like Big Bird, Elmo and Zoë?
My friend related this (paraphrased) conversation he had before with friends of his from Germany [...]

For those not familiar, “aa-AA” is the syntax from ISO 639 and ISO 3166 for countries and languages, respectively. “en-GB” is English as spoken in Great Britain, “es-PA” is Spanish as spoken in Panama, “es-MX” is Spanish as spoken in Mexico, etc.
“es-US” is Spanish as spoken in the United States.
es-US is not es-MX! [...]

I bet this is a question you didn’t consider when planning localization for your data!
Not all English-speaking countries use the imperial system, and not all countries other than USA use metric. If you accept or display any measurement-related data, this is something you probably should care about.
For example:

North America (USA and Canada) is [...]

When testing applications in alternate locales, it is somewhat of a pain to install MUI on XP, turn on fast user switching, and stay logged in twice—once as me to develop, and again as another user in an alternate language. Not to mention, I can’t really navigate around XP in anything other than French [...]