Inaccurate localization can make you forget why you did something!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/05/11 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/05/11/10304133.aspx


Every once in a while, I am reminded of the fact that I've been blogging for a good long while.

Like the other day, when Andrew added me to an email thread, saying:

+Michael, in case he knows if there are specific reasons why the keyboard name “US” was marked as not localizable with the exception of Arabic and Hebrew.

The United States-International keyboard is named differently in English too, it’s not just an issue for localization:

My first thought: "how the hell would I know?"

I'm not a localization engineer, after all.

But then thought about it.

And remembered my Inaccurate localization can make you bust out laughing blog from September of 2006.

I then realized that the localization instructions were indeed a step to try to keep a US --> BR type situation from happening again!

A slight over-reaction, to be sure. But their hearts were in the right place.

The IPE realized the best fix for the situation:

Thanks Michael.
So there wasn’t really a good reason to put the instruction there, since it was just to ensure that the translators didn’t localize US to their country equivalent. I believe we should remove the instruction and have everyone localize US to the translated equivalent of United States, to be consistent with “United States-International”

Perhaps the notion that my blog has no wider meaning or usage was knocked a bit over by the email. :-(

 Ah well, as they say, all's well that ends better!

 I suppose being able to recall such issues undermines my claim that I don't know how such things are decided.....

:-)


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