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Advoy Internationalization
advoy.com ![]()
This application has been available in as many as 7 languages in 13 different countries, so over the years I've learned a thing or two about translation and localization. In the early days we would send the entire application through our translation software (WorldServer), resulting in a dozen copies of the site, which we would then localize (format dates, numbers, addresses, etc.) by hand. At that point the translation software would introduce bugs, and our QA team was stressed to review each locale. If a correction needed to be made in the translation, we would have to re-localize it each time.
As the team grew smaller we had to work smarter. The first thing we fixed was the re-localization process. We moved anything that needed to be localized into an include that did not go through translation. At this point we also removed all the English text from our JavaScript, storing it all in JSON objects so that our .js files no longer went through translation.
Now, in our latest release, we have taken the separation of English text to the next level. We pulled all of the English text out of the source code and access it via resource bundles. Now just the .properties files go through translation, and we only have a single copy of our code to worry about. The localization of fields has also been simplified as we persuaded the business owners to allow more free form entry of non-critical data.