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Ask HN: Do you internationalize/localize your apps?

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Ask HN: Do you internationalize/localize your apps?

#1

Post by gt5050 »

Hi HN,

We are in the process of building a reporting tool that would be mostly used by sales / marketing executives to monitor ROI.

This is not a consumer facing product rather a B2B product.

We are unable to decide whether to internationalize/localize the application or not.

Here are the two approaches we are thinking

1) Launch English only for now, but plan for localization in the future

Pros:

Make the product accessible for a larger market

Cons:

Long term maintainence cost (translation would be needed for every new screen-string pair)

Seems a bit like premature optimization

2) Dont internationalize at all, given that this is not a consumer facing product

Pros: Simplify development and maintainence over long term, not having to deal with I18N

Cons: Loose out on new audience who would like to use the software in their own language

What approach would you recommend?

Also HNers whose first language is not English,

1) Roughly what percentage of software you use has option available for your language

2) Do you prefer to use software in your language if there is an option available

3) Does not having your language impact productivity while using the software.

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Do you internationalize/localize your apps?

#3

Post by gt5050 »

askafriend wrote: post #2

Can you quantify the revenue impact? Do you know your userbase at all? You’re missing some useful data that would make this decision easier.

We havent yet released the product, so we dont really have metrics around usage from international users.

We could launch English only for now, making sure that the application is ready to be internationalized in the future.

Re: Ask HN: Do you internationalize/localize your apps?

#4

Post by r-s »

I generally do internationalize apps that I build right from the start. The cost for switching at a later date I have found to be very significant.

I do not however localize them until its needed. Often working with translators and ensuring the quality of the localized application is not a huge priority in the beginning.

Re: Ask HN: Do you internationalize/localize your apps?

#5

Post by jacalata »

Your pros and cons for option 1 are wrong. You don't incur the long term cost of translating all strings just by making your software localizable - you incur it by releasing localized software. (Same for making it accessible to the larger market). It should say something like "pro: reduces future cost of deciding to release in other languages. Con: may be extra work". And how big a con that is depends a ton on what technologies you're using and whether your current plan is to just hardcore strings everywhere.

Re: Ask HN: Do you internationalize/localize your apps?

#8

Post by GuiA »

Have you validated your MVP? (ie acquired enough initial users to know that this is a viable business idea, and commit the next few years to it).

If not, then do not worry about internationalization at all, and do just English. Validate your MVP first. At this stage, you’re trying to find people who have a pressing, immediate problem to solve - and even if some of them are not native English speakers, it shouldn’t be too much of a deterrent because your product will still be a godsend to them.

If you have already validated your product, or when you have done so, but it is not immediately clear what languages besides English you should pursue, then I would recommend still picking a second language to make sure that your codebase has basic, initial support for multiple languages. If you are not in a primarily anglophone country, or members of your founding team are native in another language, then pick that one (it’d be dangerous to pick a language you have no familiarity with, as a team, because high quality translators are hard to find, and translators who can work with your designers to address more subtle cultural details are close to impossible to find).

This won’t solve all your problems - for instance if you support English and Spanish out of the box, but a few years later you realize you need to support Hebrew, you’ll likely have work to do to support a right to left script. But at least your codebase will have initial support for more than one language, which will make the effort a little less insane.

Re: Ask HN: Do you internationalize/localize your apps?

#9

Post by raverbashing »

As it's a B2B app, I don't think there's a pressing need to localize. It might be interesting though to keep things localizable (not only for I18N reasons - documentation and testing come to mind)

Now, what you should absolutely DO is make sure your system doesn't break with foreign names/data/locales

Locales to test: RTL locales (Arabic and Hebrew for the most part) and maybe Turkish (the infamous dotted capital I)

Names: Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Latin Extended (ñ, œ, ø, á, é, etc), even names in English can break stuff (O'Brian)

Dates: does it work with DD/MM/YY or YYYY-MM-DD and keeps consistent?

Re: Ask HN: Do you internationalize/localize your apps?

#10

Post by tehlike »

gt5050 wrote: post #3
askafriend wrote: post #2

Can you quantify the revenue impact? Do you know your userbase at all? You’re missing some useful data that would make this decision easier.

We havent yet released the product, so we dont really have metrics around usage from international users. We could launch English only for now, making sure that the application is ready to be internationalized in the future.

That's what i'd do. launch, get feedback.

Most people understand business-english. If your team is English-speaking, chances are, you will have much much higher chance of succeeding there.

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