A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen To You
That is a very good article.<p>One architectural takeaway suggestion I've learned over the years, which is not obvious when reading that article:<p>"You should not assume that you can generate any part of any string visible to the user without the full context."<p>Whenever you design a localizable application, it isn't enough to provide a string that can be translated. You have to allow for delegation to the most specific piece of code dealing with the string, because only that piece of code will have the appropriate context to properly produce the string.<p>This means your code can't just assume it can generate strings somewhere deep inside the guts of a library. The programmer writing the final application that uses your library needs to be able to generate/override those strings on a per-case basis in the actual code that displays them to the user. The strings might be different between two UI windows.<p>Trust me, I know. I'm Polish. Few languages are as insane as my native tongue. If you don't believe me, take a peek at this concise 252-pages long introduction to Polish numerals: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Liczebnik-grammar-numerals-exercises-language/dp/832420234X" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Liczebnik-grammar-numerals-exercises-l...</a>