Best Practices

Applying internationalization best practices lowers the costs of your localization spend while laying a firm foundation needed to scale effectively.

By taking a consultative approach, EQHO can evaluate your software, website, multi-media or documentation for internationalization best practices in order to determine the ease of localization. This analysis will help you to understand if your product is well-suited to localization and how much time, resources and budget are needed to perform translation and localization tasks.

In the event that problems are discovered with how your applications or documentation have been developed or authored, EQHO can perform a more complete analysis to produce an internationalization best practices report, outlining problem areas as well as corrective solutions and timelines.

Two relatively simple examples of internationalization best practices are: (1) separating code from the messages or text that are displayed by software or a website, and (2) the use of UTF-8 Unicode character encoding. Getting this right ahead of time will lead to quicker localization turnaround times and less costly updates or architecture and navigation changes.

Project Elements

- Evaluate software or Web 2.0 application development practices and architecture.
- Assess content management systems for multi-language, multi-locale support.
- Review rich-media and web development practices and templates.
- Appraise documentation authoring practices and template design.
- Recommend changes that increase efficiency and scalability in development, authoring and localization.

Project Deliverables

- A report containing a check-list of internationalization criteria with recommendations.
- A consultation meeting or tele-conference call to discuss action items arising from the internationalization product evaluation and subsequent report findings.
- A sensible internationalization and localization road-map, along with recommendations for optimizing development and/or localization processes.

Benefits

- Multiple language and locale-specific support.
- No costly or time-consuming modifications.
- Lower initial and ongoing translation and localization costs.
- Quicker translation and localization turnaround times leading to accelerated market entry.
- Solid foundation to scale and/or ability to adapt with greater efficiency.