Internationalization

Many major websites these days use country flags to indicate which other languages the content is available in. For example, the English language is usually represented by the Union Flag or the Dutch language by a flag of the Netherlands. The problem with this approach is that location and language are not really that related. Many countries have multiple languages, such as Belgium which has 3 national languages (Dutch, French and German) or India which has no less than 22.

Google has launched the Google Translator Kit, which automatically converts and translates any uploaded documents. This is different from the existing Google Translate tool because full documents (including images) are translated, not just plain text, and both the original text and the resulting translation remain linked and can be viewed side-to-side. This allows teams of people to collaboratively translate any document in real-time.

You’ve got the popular English-language search engines covered, so you’re good to go, right? Wrong! Your visibility on localized search engines is just as essential to your overall marketing success. Did you know that only 29.4% of the population with Internet access is natively English? There is a huge client base you could be missing out on by ignoring foreign-language and localized search engines.

Any international programmer will one day be confronted with the problem of handling languages other than English. These contain many diacritics and other letters or symbols which do not exist in the English language. When it goes wrong, things can get very ugly, with strange characters (examples: ¶, é, â, ÃŒ, ü, �, ë, ®, â��, ï) appearing in your database. How do you avoid data corruption and other problems related to character encoding? We won't be explaining everything in-depth, but provide some quick and easy pointers which allow you to get started right away.