

Ask HN: How important is internationalization for developer tools products? - andrewstuart

To what extent do developers around the world know English?<p>Is it important to develop multi language versions of developer tools?
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Nadya
I need to start saving citations for this sort of thing to back what I'm about
to say. From what I've seen, many international [0] programmers I've seen
_prefer_ English documentation for their tools and largely work with English.

A large reason for that is because programming languages are (almost?) if not
entirely in English. Take a look at _Japanese developed_ Ruby. What language
are the keywords in? Not rōmanized Japanese, but English!

I remember reading a post here on HN just a few days ago from a Swedish
programmer. When he developed a tool - he wrote the documentation in English.
A dependency for his project had both Swedish and English documentation
available. _He used the English documentation_ , even though his first
language is Swedish.

Unless you are targeting an audience in a specific region (i.e India) - I
would say i18n isn't very important. It's more important for end-users of a
product that wants a global reach.

What's most important is to have examples in your documentation that can help
explain themselves and show how the language is used.

[0] When I say foreign/international I mean countries where the official
language isn't English. I feel the need to clarify this because it _bothers
me_.

