Skip the typical software localization beginner's traps

Character Sets

Using a different language often means you must consider another character set. Especially if English is your first language, you might think that you need only 128 characters. However, many languages use special characters:

• French accents, like in à, é, î, and ç,
• Spanish punctuation, like the reverse question mark ¿,
• Umlauts, like ß, ä, ö and ü in Germany or Finland,
• Other umlauts, like æ and å used in Denmark, Norway or Sweden.

The list is endless.

So how would you feel if you couldn't use characters from your own native alphabet? What if your name is Henry, and you couldn't write your name, because a Russian software developer would not support the letter H as his/her language does not use that letter? Would you write enry instead? Or would you directly uninstall the application?

What you need to do

Use Unicode string handling in your application, whenever possible. This allows you to support all languages and character sets. The Unicode Windows API can help you accomplish this.

If your development environment supports only ANSI character sets, you should ensure that you do not restrict your input to the first 128 characters. For Delphi, and classic VB there are third-party unicode components available. DotNet developers already have unicode.

How does Sisulizer support you

Sisulizer itself is a unicode application. You exchange data with your translator without the hazzle of conversions. Sisulizer does the job for you. Period.

You can localize both, ANSI and Unicode applications using Sisulizer. No need to change the tool. Sisulizer does it all.

Sisulizer comes with integrated support of the following third-party unicode tools: LMD ElPack and TMS Unicode Component Pack for Delphi; Hexagora UNICODE components for Visual Basic.

Software localization traps

• Overview
• Languages
• Character sets
• Code pages
• Numbers
• Currencies
• Dates
• Time
• List separator
• Measurements
• Paper format
• Phone number
• Sort order
• Tax
• States
• Other traps
• Conclusion