Ask HN: Do you internationalize/localize your apps?

I don't i18n. It's a good amount of work for little benefit. I've only seen one industry capture metrics on i18n usage and that is (was?) the social games industry. All of the findings I saw pointed to the fact that even international players would prefer to play the game in English rather than their native language. I believe there's two reasons for that: to better learn English and to avoid the bugs and layout flaws that come with blindly internationalizing an app.

If you have enough customers to warrant an international version of an app, it might be worth it to completely redesign the UI around the new audience. The language used applies constraints and makes assumptions that may not be true in other languages. And then there are the culture differences...

This may not be a fair answer but being based in bilingual Canada has made localization a defacto process. We only support English, French, and have recently added Spanish so languages like Cantonese would be a challenge yet. That said it forced us to learn to structure applications with that in mind from day 1 and I'm quite glad we don't have that refactor process still ahead.

I'm German and I hate half assed i18n.

Often the translation is done poorly, E.G. the word "open" has two different meanings when translated to German, depending on if it's used as a verb or adverb.

I especially used to hate the translation for git, because I couldn't understand it, since they even translated all the core concepts like "branch" into "Ast". It seems like it's better now, but there are still errors which are not translated, so the screentext is mixed German and English.

In the software I maintain I hate translations, because all the time project managers forget that I need the texts in two languages. Also there's never the perfect time to do the texts, since you almost always have to change the UI and all translations.

One tip: if you use dates, please use YYYY-MM-DD and not MM/DD/YYYY. The first format is universally understood, the second one almost always trips me up since we use DD.MM.YYYY in Germany.

The solution is: Build support for translations into your code and only offer English as language. You can later add additional languages without having to replace every hardcoded text with a translation ID.

The most basic version of how it works: Where you want your translated text, put a function, e.g. called “T” that takes a string as argument and returns a string. The function uses this argument (translation ID) to look up the actual translation in a map.

What's the most used language? And does that language have its own UI layout or is it just crammed into the English language UI?

I don't think I have the raw data anymore. They don't let you keep that sort of thing when you leave. :)