So how important is localization?

[Michael Tippach]

Obviously, there is a reason for me to ask this question - it has been brought to my attention that there is a number of Chinese sites offering a SC localized version of ASIO4ALL for download. If you install one of these, it would supposedly also introduce the CnsMin variety of adware to your system!

You can even d/l ASIO4ALL from Chinese crack sites now. Why anyone would want to crack a freeware in particular escapes me, though...

I reckon that e.g. roughly 25% of the world's population do not understand English but have a firm grasp on SC, in addition to those few million French folks who would always refuse to touch anything non-francois. ;D

Bottom line: Do you think it is worth while changing ASIO4ALL so that it can be localized easily? Would there be interest among non-native English speaking users to do the localization in exchange for credit being given in the documentation and on the ASIO4ALL Web site?

[Kermit]

Frankly, I wouldn't care. I'm sure this is not the case with all the users but...
Hell, I've just realized that we are on an English forum! If anybody needs localisation, they won't be able to read this thread ;D
Anyway, IMHO you should not waste time with localization. If somebody can use an ASIO application, they can also tweak ASIO4ALL parameters, no further explanation required.

Again, on this occasion, many THANKS for a great little application.
Apparently your work is appreciated on many parts of the world
Regards from Turkey.

[guitou]

Be aware that localization is always a huge work, because when you're done with text strings (which can be a big part), some people ask you to implement right-to-left writing; when you implement it, some other people ask you Unicode for Asian or Arabic alphabets; and finally when you are fully "internationalized", you have to maintain localization at each version, which implies to ask all of your translators over the world to translate the word you just added to your application... moreover, you will receive a lot of corrections because some translators made a lot of mistakes...

But, if you want your software to be thousand times more popular than today, and keep its first place for many years, you can't escape from this work forever. Despite the popularity and universality of English, there are a lot of people (in France or in many other countries ) who still don't understand it.

Translation of strings can be a first step, and would be easy to implement for a mini application like yours.

Good luck and long life to asio4all and to its creator!

Guitou

[mad]

Michael,

Thank you for your great work and effort!

My first language isn't English, and I was somehow pushed to understand English due to the lack of internationalization... wich, believe me, imposed to me a lot of effort and time that I could have used in a more productive way (even when I don't regret this).

Your claim about "just 25% of population doesn't "understands" English sounds a "little" stretched... taking into account the Chinese population ALONE. And even so, you have to take into account how much understanding is required to produce such a figure: it may be just enough to figure out where is the bathroom in a foreign country before messing up in their pants, but not enough to translate technical stuff.

In the other hand, there is a political issue here (an point I believe you'll ponder, giving your ideas and the way you express them): cultural imposition. For a lot of people around the world, being forced to learn a foreign language becomes some sort of punishment for having a different language and culture.

As a whole, and mostly because of the "market rules", the culture suffers over time: their own language is being shaped by foreign terms since most people doesn't have the chance of making up and use new terms in their own language, the market lowers costs by imposing the foreign language while disregarding carelessly their own (for example, subtitling movies instead of re-recording the voices, and even worst, employing illiterate -more cheaper- people for the subtitling which leads to kids misspelling words afterwards -yeah, not even waste time running a spell checker). As a direct effect, people reacts against this, refusing to translate/internationalize commercial products becomes greatly ill seen, for some it's even insulting because it feels that as an attempt to demote their own cultural values.

Now, people like you who are doing a great contribution FOR FREE gets affected. A lot of people isn't even able to get that it's just one guy doing this on his own without earning a penny as to invest in a translation and you end up in the same bag with those who actually can but choose not to do it to save a penny.

Kermit is right about the internationalization complexities... for as long as you build the A4A user interface with your current tools. I may think of some other options (more "skinable"), able to make it easiest for contributors to help internationalize and keep the peace of your developments without having to deal with your main software code. Even so, it may impose a burden to you, able to spoil the fun you say you get from doing this.

However, I think there exist an easiest way to face this problem: instead of wasting effort on internationalizing the software itself, you may provide guidelines to write clever user manuals in foreign languages, for example, providing pictures of the user interface with arrows pointing to the translated terms, plus the explanation of how to use each feature, perhaps as PDF or HTML documents that the user can open and put side by side with the application.

As a variation that imposes some more effort from you, you may add a number next to every control in the UI, so the foreign user just have to look for that number in his/her localized user manual... or even better, if you dare to talk with a web browser from within your application, provide a link next to the controls to open a HTML page at an anchor point. The contributors just have to honor those anchors to provide the translation in the HTML pages.

Something like this, plus an explanation of why you're internationalizing this way, written by you and translated by the contributor should be enough for help foreign users understand and use A4A, while making they feel their culture is taken into account, plus it would reduce the translating effort enough for you to count with more contributors (and less people complaining because of their country picture being portrayed in the exit button, after they... get to know you better this way).

[Wushu]

I think the way you are currently handling the localizations is correct.

Otherwise, making it easily localizable, would span several low-quality localizations of the same language, and therefore confuse the respective language users.

Also, you'll have to implement some kind of config load, or plugin system, which would make a little more complicated the interface.

And I always *loved* the simplicity of the program.

[Wushu]

Woo, necroposting!