i18n without headache

The expansion of the international market is one of the most important characteristics of the economic development of companies around the world, which leads to the introduction of software products in international markets.

In this way, companies must make an arduous effort to adapt their processes, procedures, and products. Companies that strategically decide to internationalize face the challenge of ensuring that their products or services have an adequate linguistic, cultural, and legal transformation so that they can be adapted to different countries.

The development of internationalized products or services is a complex and expensive task due to the increased hours of work in design and coding, the need for additional tools and skills, and the effects on management and project architecture. The early detection of internationalization requirements by the architect and project leader influences the ease of implementation and the detection and correction of errors.

As we know, software internationalization (i18n) is the process of preparing a product at a technical level so that it can be feasibly adapted to multiple languages and cultural conventions without extensive redesign for each language. The i18n is shown as a process but also as the succession of steps integrated to create a global product, which is designed, developed, and quality guaranteed for the foreign market.

In the case of software, if a software product is not internationalized in advance, it is almost certain that an additional expense will be incurred during the localization process, which in some cases will make this process not feasible.

The degree of internationalization depends partly on the complexities of the languages to be introduced. If you will localize a product developed in English into French, Italian, German, and Spanish, the level of complexity is significantly lower than would it would be required if the product is to support Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Arabic, and Hindi, which require very special planning and design considerations.

Continuous Internationalization #️⃣

Internationalization as a continuous process is a new approach to global content, integrating with the CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Distribution) method companies use to deliver software to their customers frequently.

When adding new features or content, design teams should be aware of language-specific requirements such as bi-directionality (LTR/RTL) of languages and distribution of word lengths in various languages. To achieve this, effective and agile UX localization is a must.

Developers should rigorously follow best i18n practices such as string externalization, correct use of placeholders, plurals, and currency and date formatting.

Making internationalization and localization a tightly embedded part of the CI/CD workflow allows teams to shorten release cycles and deliver a multilingual experience seamlessly. Localization suites such as Localazy can help you with continuous internationalization, translation management, and global delivery of translated content.

The corporate value of continuous internationalization #️⃣

When implemented correctly, continued internationalization almost always results in higher team productivity, more collaboration, faster time to market, and lower risk than achieved by traditional approaches.

Fundamental steps to build the foundations of internationalization as a continuous process:

• Improve your efforts with quality i18n engineering
• Eliminate friction points between development and localization
• Adopt technology that unites departments and adjusts to their workflows

Conclusion #️⃣

Continuous internationalization is the most efficient process for companies that frequently release localized updates to their apps, websites, and content. Continuous internationalization and localization help you in future-proofing your products while your organization expands its global focus.

There are several benefits to using Localazy CDN. Let’s view the Localazy CDN from the perspective of developers, users, and, most importantly, yourself.

Saves time for developers #️⃣

Automation saves your development team precious time. Localazy CDN effectively shortens the release cycle and reduces the room for error because it takes one of the variables out of the equation! Once you have everything set up, you won’t have to worry about releasing new languages into your online product.

Localazy CDN is also compatible with different releases of your localizable files in Localazy. All your release tags are automatically available so that you can serve the fresh files for your testing, and once you are sure of their quality, you can push them to production.

Instant worldwide coverage for your users #️⃣

Serve your users freshly translated content in a matter of minutes. All changes published in Localazy will propagate across all CDN points of presence in minutes. Users are always served the file from the closes geographical location, making the load times shorter and the experience more seamless.

Scales with your project and saves you time and money #️⃣

Our CDN is built on proven and scalable technologies, so you don’t need to worry about whether you have ten or ten million users. You can start using the CDN for under $1/month and always keep track of your costs on the dashboard. We serve terabytes of data and hundreds of millions of requests monthly. Localazy CDN is infinitely scaleable and grows with your business.

You can reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) significantly when delivering translations through Localazy Content Delivery Network (CDN). Our Localazy CDN is a cloud-based solution that provides fast and reliable delivery of translated files to your global audience. You don’t need to worry about hosting, scaling, or maintaining your own servers or infrastructure for translations.

Our CDN is powered by proven and scalable technologies that can handle any amount of traffic, from a few users to millions. You can start using our CDN for less than $1 per month, and you can easily monitor and control your costs through your dashboard. We process terabytes of data and hundreds of millions of requests every month with high performance and availability.

The Localazy CDN is infinitely scalable, growing seamlessly alongside your expanding business.

In software development, internationalization (i18n) should always be seen as an inseparable part of the main activities of the development process, such as the specification of requirements, design, implementation, and testing.

Learn how internationalization affects the four stages of the software development cycle:

STAGE 1 - Software Specification: #️⃣

Software requirements play a primary role in the development process of a software product. It is based on the needs raised by customers at a very general level, where the services or components of what you want to produce are discovered, documented, analyzed, and defined, in addition to the restrictions that the software product will have. Its main goal is to define the process to follow in software development and to facilitate understanding of the client’s requirements.

In the context of a development process aligned with i18n, it is the fundamental pillar in fulfilling the strategic objectives of the globalization of a product.

Important things to consider with regards to internationalization in the software specification stage are:

1. Current legislation.
2. Locales.
3. Complexity of the translated language, in which each introduces particular elements considered of less or greater difficulty for the i18n process.
4. Representation of the contents (User Interface).
5. Functional requirements of the business.
6. Technology Restrictions.

When it comes to a new market, Managers must thoroughly study all the necessary aspects associated with the culture in the destination market.

STAGE 2 - Software Architecture: #️⃣

Software architecture consists of making decisions about the logical organization of the software product. It is the process where the architecture, components, interfaces, and other characteristics of a system or software component are defined.

It involves the set of principles, concepts, and practices that lead to developing a high-quality system or product. Design principles establish a primary philosophy that will guide you in the design work.

This stage is where the architecture that will support the desired software product is defined.

Therefore, a set of elements must be taken into account, emphasizing the base architecture of the software, such as:

1. Achieve the decoupling of the different layers that make up the structure of the architecture.
2. Consider using the Unicode coding standard in all architecture layers and components used.
3. Maximize the architecture’s adaptability by incorporating business rules and workflow engines, as well as the adaptability of your object model.
4. Externalize the texts used within the application.
5. Create user interfaces capable of adapting to different languages.
6. Take into account the i18n and localization capabilities provided by each of the Database Management Systems to be used.
7. Consider a correct design of the database schemes attached to the different types of information related to the target market’s culture.
8. Select the internationalized COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) software to be integrated into architecture so that they can adapt to different markets.

STAGE 3 - Software Implementation: #️⃣

At this stage of software development, the most important artifacts of the software product are produced.

Things to consider during this stage are:

1. Proper documentation associated with the product, such as the online help, the user manual, and the installation manual, among others.
2. Careful implementation of the i18n best practices outlined in the architecture, implementation of i18n libraries, and standards.

STAGE 4 - Software Testing: #️⃣

The software testing process consists of the dynamic verification of the behavior of the developed product in a finite set of test cases against the expected behavior. In the case of the testing stage of internationalized software, it doesn’t differ from the conventional one. It only has a greater scope as there is a need to evaluate all those elements associated with i18n and those specified in previous stages.

At this stage, it is necessary to devote considerable effort because it is the stage where the result of an entire development process is evaluated, and its quality is guaranteed.

Conclusion #️⃣

The i18n of software is not an easy process to carry out. It takes time and funding to conduct in-depth research that helps create more competitive software products in the international market.

This fundamental process must be aligned with the conventional development cycle from the early stages to incorporate the characteristics associated with a software product appropriate to the needs of international markets.

Here are the basic steps to get started:

1. Set the Laravel application locale: In Laravel, you can set the application’s locale by modifying the config/app.php file. You’ll need to set the locale value to the language you want to use as the default for your application.
2. Create translation files: Laravel provides a simple way to manage translation strings by using language files. You can create language files for each language your application supports in the resources/lang directory. The files can be named according to the language code, such as en.php for English or fr.php for French. Or you can use folder structure such as resources/lang/en/welcome.php
3. Define translation strings: You can define translation strings inside each language file by creating an associative array. For applications with a large number of translatable strings, defining every string with a “short key” can become confusing when referencing the keys in your views, and it is cumbersome to continually invent keys for every translation string supported by your application. For this reason, Laravel also provides support for defining translation strings using the “default” translation of the string as the key.
4. Use translation strings in views and controllers: In your Laravel views and controllers, you can use the __() function to translate strings. The __() function takes the original string as its argument and returns the translated string based on the current application locale.
5. Switch locales dynamically: Laravel makes it easy to switch the application locale dynamically. You can use the App::setLocale() method to set the application locale based on user preferences or other factors.

That’s the basic process for localizing a Laravel project. You can use many other advanced features and techniques, but these steps should help you get started.

For more information, visit the official documentation at https://laravel.com/

Yes it does! You might enjoy the fact that we are building the front-end of the Localazy platform with Vue.js and vue-i18n, and we are a proud sponsor of Kazupon, who is the creator of the library.

Integrating your project with Localazy is pretty straightforward, and you can do it in five short steps:

1. Sign up and create your first project. 🚀

2. From the list of integrations, choose Vue.js, install Localazy CLI, and configure vue-i18n. 👨‍💻

3. Copy and modify this configuration into the localazy.json file in the root.

4. Create a locales folder with a JSON file based on the source language. E.g., en.json 📂

5. Run localazy upload in the CLI to upload your source file.

After you translate your strings to the desired languages, you can download the translations by running localazy download. 📂

Follow the whole tutorial How to localize Vue.js app with vue-i18n and Localazy on the Localazy Blog.

Software internationalization (known as i18n) is the process of preparing software for localization and translation. Engineers and software developers are in charge of optimizing the software to implement translations from other languages. 👨‍💻

🌐 Internationalization is concerned not simply with making the software adaptable for other languages but also adapting it for different data formats, settings, interfaces, and local customs. For achieving this, four points are essential:

• Appropriate design and development. Developers should prepare the website to present no challenges to localization. Some examples are: ensuring legacy character encoding is done correctly, allowing Unicode, concatenating strings properly, utilizing less code for user-interface string values, etc.
• Supporting features needed only for localization. Some elements should be implemented even if they’re not used for other processes besides localization. Such features include adding CSS support for non-Latin typographic or vertical text and DTD for bidirectional text support and language identification.
• Preparing code to display local data formats. Developers should identify patterns of data formats from previous localization data, libraries, or users’ responses. This assists in showing addresses, names, local calendars, and numbers, among other details, in a familiar format for users.
• Separation of localizable elements. Localizable features should be implemented, but developers must ensure they aren’t displayed unexpectedly when not needed. For this, it’s best to distinguish these elements beforehand in the source code to trigger them only when needed.

🤔 For instance, postcodes and ZIP codes have different formats depending on the country. In a Canadian version of the site, postcodes are presented in X0X 0X0 format (X - letter and 0 - number). The UK version has X00 0XX format, and the Brazilian version is 00000-000.

Not paying attention to these features could prevent users from placing orders from their country. Internationalization takes care of such distinctions.

Localazy API is prepared to handle adequately internationalized projects with multiple locales, and with the API, developers can automate the following l10n and translation process for multilingual adaptation of each feature. 😎