

Impact of adding internationalization to a modern browser-based business application - sigmaml

In particular, what has been observed to be the range (in %) of impact that i18n has on effort and time-to-delivery, when it is added well (about mid-way) into the cycle?
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BjoernKW
Sorry, I don't have detailed research or a percentage. All I can say from -
somewhat anecdotal - experience is that it'll be at least a moderate PITA.

In general, i18n tools for Java are quite sophisticated so with Java it won't
be that much of a problem. Other environments probably require some more
manual work.

Some IDEs (Intellij IDEA and Eclipse for instance) allow you to extract
strings from your source code and externalize those into a property file.
However, those tools aren't perfect and will likely still miss some strings.
So, at least some manual work will still be necessary.

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luxpir
You'd probably want a reasonably stable version before i18n to avoid much of
the back and forth with edits, additions, context queries etc. The more
complete the picture your translators have, the better quality your efforts
will yield (thus better conversion/engagement/retention) in theory.

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sigmaml
Thanks for your replies!

We have convinced the customer that it is better to get the English version
into production first, get market feedback, get some traction, and then
proceed with i18n+l10n.

