The Locales of Windows 7, divvied up further

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/07/07 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/07/07/10183904.aspx

Back in the end of May, in The Locales of Windows 7, all divvied up, I had a bunch of tables in it:

• Table #1: The locales representing languages into which Windows 7 localizes;
• Table #2: The locales representing languages for which Windows creates Language Interface Packs, aka LIPs;
• Table #3: Locales whose identifiers are not directly associated with any localizations of Windows, even if a related identifier might make for one representing a suitable localization.

Now I did palm a few cards in the process of listing out these items, and just as a con artist who is caught palming cards is forced to reveal what was hidden, so have I been asked to give some other entries that I had previously not included.

Unlike the con artist, the omission was in my case unintentional -- I dimply was not asked the questions.

But, now that I have been asked, this excuse has been taken away from me.

Thus I present these other tables now:

 Table #4: The locales into which Windows Server 2008 R2 is localized:

Table #5: The locales into which PowerShell is localized, by Microsoft:

Table #6: The locales into which Visual Studio is localized, by Microsoft:

Note that Table 6 was mostly cribbed from Soma's Visual Studio goes international blog.

Of course it would be easy to notice how closely PowerShell conforms to the DevDiv list rather than the Windows Server list, and many people have done that before.

Mostly the people who do such explaining are really weaving a narrative to match the facts as they are than providing actual justifications; in this case it is much more reasonable for a program such as PowerShell (that is produced by DevDiv for Windows) to match the DevDiv list.

I remember a while back I had asked an exec over in the Windows world about the work descibed in Scott Hanselman's Using Crowdsourcing for Expanding Localization of Products. You know, like whether it represented a bold new direction for Microsoft localization?

They were not familiar with this particular program, though they assured me that that this was not a "Windows plan" and in fact it sounded more like a group with a more meager localization budget. :-)

This may have been hyperbole,of course.

And with a frank admission of a lack of familiarity, it should not be taken too seriously. But it would be reasonable to assume that the localization budget could be trimmed, perhaps in part due to the actual business cases in question not being made. And that the "corner cases" for which neither business case nor budget exist were being handled a bit more creatively than just doing nothing (in the absence of a "LIP type" solution to the problem, at least. Crowdsourcing does meet that bar.

There is a part of me that wishes that Table 4 and Table 5 could be closer to identical than Table 5 and Table 6 are.

Perhaps LIPs have spoiled me, but even if the extent of the actual localization was incomplete there are few places I have been to where developers and sysadmins don't prefer their own language, and that lack of coverage is much more about the kind of issue described in The Portguese version. No, the other Portuguese version... than About that Portuguese localization question, redux..., if you know what I mean.

Which means that I wish the folks in DevDiv had more budget, to get more done -- they need the opportunity to do good work and encourage more people to use Windows (for those who only want English, their needs are met already). The whole crowdsourcing thing directly implies they are trying to go further anyway.

But the disadvantage to crowdsourcing is that too often one gets what one pays for. And I think we as a company can do better than that, and align our message better. Every group should either have similar localization targets, or good bueiness reasons for the differences. I've had my fill of "after the fact" status quo justifications (and since other groups beyond the Office and Windows clients are profitable, some of them can clearly afford it!).

I'll talk more about topics even further out than this blog some other day....

Zuhra on 7 Jul 2011 9:34 PM:

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