Skip the typical software localization beginner's traps

Author: Renate Reinartz

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.

More software localization traps

1. Languages
2. Character sets
3. Code pages
4. Numbers
5. Currencies
6. Dates
7. Time
8. List separator
9. Measurements
10. Paper format
11. Phone number
12. Sort order
13. Tax
14. States
15. Other traps
16. Conclusion