Skip the typical software localization beginner's traps

Sort Order

As described in the previous information about character sets, different countries or languages have different lists of characters, or, in other words, different alphabets.

Thus, the languages can have additional characters like umlauts or accents, such as in German, French, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Turkish, and so on. Some languages don't support some of our favorite characters, like h in Russian, x in Greek, and many more.

All these languages sort their characters differently. If you do alphabetical sorts in your application, you should at least think about supporting the sort order in the localized language. Amazingly, even large or popular applications do not support sort order in their localized applications, at least in the past.

Are different sort orders important?

Supporting different sort orders depends on the importance of your users alphabetizing their data. For example, if you have an application that handles addresses, contact information, or other large amounts of data, your user will definitely miss this feature.

What you need to do

In .Net, you can check the culture name space for the sort order. In other development systems, you must check your string sorting routines; and, for your own implementation, you may have to collect the necessary data on the web first.