Growing Software

Appendix B. INTERNATIONALIZATION

Internationalization of a website or application is more complex than it might first appear. When thinking about internationalization, an engineering team's first instinct may be to focus on translating the program's English text into another language—and how hard could that be? Instead, however, the team encounters complex problems, with many details to investigate, and some of them can remain unclear until after the company actually ships the product.

Internationalization is more than language translation, as it requires knowledge of currencies, laws, formatting, images, data structures, timelines, and costs. The depth of work can be clarified by knowing what areas to investigate and what questions to ask. Until ...