Localizers

Microsoft spends about $300 million on localizing our applications. Of the 50% of that cost that is spent on testing, 70% is taken up by testing and fixing cosmetic UI bugs. These are things like the localized text in a control not fitting in the space originally provided when the dialog was designed in another language. These are hard to track and extremely expensive to fix. More importantly, Microsoft has more than 2000 people working on localization (around 1000 FTE's) and in peak periods such as the 6 months to the Office 2000 release, over 3000 people. If the layout of the dialogs was managed correctly, a vast amount of this time and effort would be saved. 

Localization also introduces a class of functional bugs due to words being localized that should not have been. A good example here is a file open control containing the file mask “*.doc”. Obviously in this case, the “*.doc” should not be translated as it will cause programmatic errors.

How does RCML address Localizers needs?

In order to solve the most common localization problem of the localized text being larger than the original control and thus, being clipped (i.e. text running off the end), the dialog loader will automatically resize the controls at load time, to ensure the text fits without clipping. The dialog will be automatically resized intelligently to allow the expanded controls to fit without throwing off the rest of the dialog.

Following some research and development work by the internal localization tools group, the localization teams are providing a schema known as GML (Globalization Markup Language), which is a set of XML tags that RCML will support.  The GML spec will provide information to the localizing tools such as what text should be localized and what should not. In addition, it will be possible to insert comments in with the RCML that are used by the localizers to make notes on specific areas, which will be ignored by the loader.

On going discussions with the localization teams will ensure that as RCML is developed and extended such that their needs will be taken in to account as much as possible.

More info

Curious about the localization process?  Look here: http://mste/interface/issue12/home.asp

If you have any more needs, or wish to debate the above, click here