Internationalization

In this post I am going to talk of addressing a global audience with your software developed. Following the guidelines for international design seen in class:

• Be careful about using images that depict hand gestures or people.
• Use generic icons. 
• Choose colours that are not associated with national flags or political movements.
• Ensure that the product supports different calendars, date formats, and time formats.
• Ensure that the product supports different number formats, currencies, weights and measurement systems.
• Ensure that the product supports international paper sizes, envelope sizes, and address formats.
• Avoid integrating text in graphics as they cannot be translated easily.
• Allow for text expansion when translated from English.

If you want to have a greater user diversity, you have to analyze some cultural aspects of your possible users, for example, the language. To research in the field of culture, it is advisable "the six dimensions of national culture" - Geert Hofstede research.

Develop a software application in a single language, Spanish for instance, may cause the loss of many potential non-Spanish speaking users. It is common that when looking for an application, the user makes the decision to acquire/purchase an application or another depending on whether it is compatible with his/her native language.

The process to make an international version of a software application, as far as language is concerned, is usually divided into the following two steps:

• Internationalization: The process of introduce externally editable strings in the source code. In turn also it involves the use of certain format methods for dates, numbers, etc. This work is done by the developer himself.

• Location: The process of editing these externalized strings for a given language. This work is usually done by a professional translator.

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And to finish this post, I want to show a sample of cultural differences regarding reading direction in the languages.

left_to_right

right_to_left

top_to_bottom

In the case top_to_bottom it can be written horizontally or vertically, so the example of the elements in the settings screen would be the same as in the case left_to_right. To be able to see a sample of the difference in the reading direction we have to see it in a text editor app.