The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript i18n

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Why It’s Important to Internationalize Your JavaScript

Internationalization (i18n) is the process of preparing software so that it supports local languages and cultural settings. In other words, JavaScript i18n is the process of making your JavaScript application localization-ready. An internationalized product supports the requirements of local markets around the world, functioning more appropriately based on local norms and better meeting in-country user expectations.

Benefits of JavaScript i18n include:

  • Higher quality software that meets the technical and cultural needs of multiple locales
  • Reduced time, cost, and effort for localization (L10n)
  • Single source code for all languages of the product
  • Simpler, easier maintenance for future iterations of the product
  • Greater in-country customer acceptance and satisfaction

The global software market is increasingly growing in demand and volume. Many major software companies derive the majority of their revenue from markets other than the country in which the company was founded. Going global often leads to revenue growth for software organizations.

If you have international users, or if you plan to move into additional international markets, it behooves you to not only internationalize your JavaScript but to also localize your product to deliver both the linguistic and cultural experience that a local user would (and should) expect.

The Risks of Not Internationalizing Your JavaScript

If you choose to skip internationalizing your JavaScript, be prepared for several significantly negative ramifications, including lower sales, weakened competitiveness, and frustrated local users.

It will start when your JavaScript application is confusing to use for a native speaker. When they review and spread the word about the product’s subpar and confusing interface your initial market impression will be poor. Although your audience will want your software’s functionality, they will want and expect an experience tailored to their needs, much as you’ve accounted for in your domestic market.

You may be able to attract early adopters without internationalizing, but for many markets you won’t be able to achieve deeper market penetration. Users will be contacting you and tying up your tech support to understand miscommunicated or simply poorly identified aspects of your program and likely demanding fixes for a number of small internationalization bugs that should have been addressed before the program was released. As word spreads you will have introduced a need for direct competition to your offering in the market.

There’s a better way. Internationalize from the start and satisfy the needs of local users in your global markets.

JavaScript Internationalization Resources

Internationalization & Localization Software

Lingoport Suite is your operating system for exceptional global software, empowering more than 300,000 developers to release software in global markets successfully.

  • Internationalization Software
    With Lingoport Globalyzer, find and fix i18n issues that inhibit localization and global user experience during development. Catch up on i18n technical debt. Avoid rework. Eliminate the manual tracking of locale updates. Collaborate on your i18n efforts via Slack.
  • Localization Process Software
    Make localization proactive using Lingoport Resource Manager. Eliminate error-prone, tedious, manual processes that slow down localization. Detect & manage changes to resource files in your source code. Streamline translation jobs. Automate localization updates between development and translation. Collaborate on your L10n efforts via Slack.
  • Linguistic QA Software
    With Lingoport InContext QA, quickly identify an issue during linguistic QA, enter in a new translation, edit directly on your screen, enter a bug, and have the file automatically updated after approval using your workflows. You’ll be editing directly in the context of your software. No more screenshots!

Questions?

Questions about JavaScript i18n? Contact us for a consultation or to schedule a demo of Lingoport Suite, our i18n software suite.

How to Identify an Internationalization (i18n) False Positive | Lingoport

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What is a false positive

‘False Positive’ is a common term used when dealing with any automated checking system when an error is reported and the user deems that it doesn’t need to be fixed. You have likely run across a false positive or ‘false alarm’ when working with a grammar check in a word processor.

False positives occur for a few reasons. Software is complex, and it can be safer to over-report than over correct. When measuring complex conditions there will be instances where something that would be an error to one person would not be an error to another. Initially, it needs to be reported. As reporting is managed and controlled, the ease of use with the error reporting will increase. It is expected that users understand and address false positives to make the most of whichever system they are working with.

What is an i18n false positive?

There are some quirks that set i18n (internationalization) false positives apart.

False Positive Example

False Positive Example

It can be difficult to locate a false positive when it relates to an issue but doesn’t actually identify a problem that needs to be addressed.

False Positives vs Issues

Software internationalization rule sets are broken down into 4 categories of detection types:

  • Embedded Strings – Any hard-coded string in the application that will need to be translated.
  • Locale-Sensitive Methods – For example, Date/Time, Encoding, or String Concatenation methods.
  • General Patterns – For example, hard coded fonts, encodings, or date formats: ‘ASCII’, ‘ARIAL’, ‘mm/dd/yy’.
  • Static File References – Application references to static files, some of which may need to be localized.

How to fix an i18n false positive

Any quality automated reporting system will have a way to identify similar false positive patterns. A simple example would be if a grammar check was identifying Art as a word that shouldn’t be capitalized in the middle of a sentence. Despite this being the name of someone commonly referred to in the user’s work, the user would identify the error and tell the system to stop reporting the false positive.

When addressing an i18n related false positive in Globalyzer, Lingoport’s i18n software that identifies and fixes i18n issues during development and enables users to eliminate i18n technical debt, new rule filters need to be created. Doing so requires filling out a simple form.

String Method Filter

A more technical overview of Globalyzer’s specific requirements for manually addressing false positives can be found here. 

Rule filters help by identifying patterns within the reporting system and refining them to the user’s specific requirements. Individual issues can be flagged for removal at the user’s discretion as well.

What if this could automatically be solved?

To achieve seamless global software development that incorporates i18n into the development process itself, it’s necessary to address the complexities of false positives and to learn to manage them efficiently. However, manually checking i18n false positives is simply too cumbersome for today’s fast-paced agile development.

Lingoport is excited to announce we are fixing this problem with Machine Learning!

The power leveraged from machine learning is more complex than simply writing rule filters automatically. Soon i18n error reports will become dynamic documents that allow any organization to spend less time identifying errors and more time optimizing the product.

Ensure your team isn’t wasting time while internationalizing software for the world market. Watch the recording of our machine learning webinar, and discover how machine learning makes i18n false positives a thing of the past.

New Webinar: Pinpointing i18n Issues Quickly with Machine Learning

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We invite you to watch a recording of Lingoport’s recent webinar, “Pinpointing i18n Issues Quickly with Machine Learning.” Machine learning is quickly changing the software development and testing landscape. View the recording, and learn to put machine learning to work so that your teams create better internationalized software, faster, easier and more naturally in every sprint.

Date/Time

Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2018
Time: 9am PDT, Noon EDT, 18:00 CEST
Duration: 45 minutes plus Q&A

Internationalization (i18n) Prevents Localization Problems

The best way to deal with i18n issues is to find them as the code is written or committed to source. Now, we have a predictive method to make this type of detection faster and easier than ever before.

Lingoport Globalyzer Now Powered by Machine Learning

The most common objection to i18n detection during development involves dealing with false positives. It takes a sophisticated detection system to distinguish between a true i18n issue and a programming element that looks like a problem but isn’t.

Lingoport’s Globalyzer has had multiple methods to do this by default and through customization for years, but through the implementation of machine learning, we’ve taken a further leap forward for powerful i18n detection even for highly unique software requirements.

What You Will Learn

  • How to bridge gaps between L10n and development
  • Effective i18n issue detection in source code
  • The false positive conundrum
  • Applying machine learning to i18n issue detection
  • Scaling i18n expertise across your development teams
  • Measuring, collaborating and supporting i18n in every sprint

Who Should Attend

  • Localization Managers
  • Development managers
  • Localization and development engineers
  • Product, Program and Project Managers with international objectives

View i18n Webinar Recording

Phasing Software i18n and L10n: What’s Right for Your Company?

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Going global is a big step. Moving from the massive challenge of getting a company off the ground and past the initial challenge of proving that your idea can work has already put your company in a league beyond most.

Aside from incidental web traffic and interest from new countries and regions, for many companies, going global means setting up partnerships, offices and agents. For software, it also means internationalizing and localizing software so that it’s competitive and meets sales requirements. Internationalization (i18n) of your software is a business case driven undertaking, in response to opportunities and strategy. It is not like a feature that you might add in a sprint or two.

That said, all global targets are not equal in terms of technical requirements. This post gives you a brief overview of stages of software i18n and localization (L10n) and what opportunities each may open for your company. It’s not intended as a technical resource, but more as a primer for product and localization managers.

The Basics

Venice, Italy

  • Internationalization, often abbreviated as i18n (i – then 18 letters – n), is the process of making a single code base locale-independent so the application can be easily localized to other locales with no source code changes.
  • Localization, often abbreviated as L10n (L– then 10 letters– n), is the translation and application of locale-specific terms and style so that a product is locale-specific – that is, it looks and reads like a product native to the market in which it is being sold.
  • Globalization, sometimes abbreviated as g11n (g– then 11 letters– n), includes both internationalization and localization together and often refers to the entire process of supporting other locales.
  • A locale in computing is a set of parameters that defines the user’s language, region and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their user interface. Usually a locale identifier consists of at least a language identifier and a region identifier. Consider that in both the US and the UK, the typical language is English, but other parameters such as date format, temperature and even some spelling is different.

Why Wasn’t It Internationalized in the First Place?

Venice, Italy

In a perfect world, all products would be created with i18n as a fundamental requirement from the start. But often with new product development, teams are just trying to make a product work and see if there’s a response. The initial focus is on relevance and acceptance of the application. Follow-on efforts are feature focused. I18n isn’t really like a feature, as its requirements underpin an entire application.

As mentioned above, going back and internationalizing code requires a business case. It takes time and will distract the development team from new features. There are times when products are rewritten, which is an excellent window to spend some effort on internationalization. In many cases i18n is a good opportunity for outsourcing, bringing in i18n expertise that allows your team to focus elsewhere, while still learning from the experts to ensure that future development will be internationalized. Expert help enables you to implement i18n faster with greater quality and less project risk.

Although people often think i18n is just about string externalization and the resulting localization, there is much more involved. There are locale frameworks that will govern locale behavior, methods/functions/classes that may need to be changed, static files to alter, and even hard coded patterns (e.g. a hard coded font) that may need fixing. Issues like date/time, address, phone number, numerical and measurement formats will have to adapt to local preferences. You’ll need character support, sorting changes and more. String externalization is like the visible part of an iceberg. You see it, but there’s much more below the surface.

Consumer Facing Software

Vernazza, Italy

It’s easy to see how consumer facing software has a higher requirement for i18n and L10n if it’s to gain broad acceptance, even in markets where English is more common.

That said, we do hear the argument that English is commonly used and understood in many places. Remember, if you travel to major cities in Europe, you’ll find that you can get along with English pretty well. But in terms of product preferences, people typically prefer engaging in their own languages. As you get out of major cities, you’ll find less English proficiency. Even with English (which English?) you still have formatting issues as mentioned, like decimal and comma placement in numbers.

Technical Software

Internationalization Phases

We see the “English everywhere” argument even more with technical software. To an extent, if your users are technical (i.e., system administrators), you can use English in more markets. But you’ll fall flat in Asia Pacific countries, such as Japan, Korea and China.

Below is a broad summary of i18n phases or levels which can be applied depending upon the business case. The best is to be global ready for everywhere of course.

Unicode

If your targets are in Western European languages (i.e. French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and more), you won’t need Unicode support in your application. That said, if you’re working on i18n, I like to recommend that people take on Unicode as early as possible. Most every modern database and programming language offers Unicode support, but you have to enable it. In our experience, Unicode support can be about 25% more work on an i18n implementation (there are exceptions), but remember that if you’re already in the code making i18n changes, it’s more efficient to do it now than restart the process later. This is a generalization, and there are plenty of specific application, business case and market driven exceptions. For example, somebody sold something and you have to deliver your product in Brazilian Portuguese in three months (true story!).

Unicode support will need to be a prerequisite if you have plans for markets/languages with complex scripts such as Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Arabic and Cyrillic based languages (i.e., Russian).

I18n Phase 1: Data

Internationalization

The very first internationalization priority should be the ability to input, process and transform customer data. In my opinion, this should be a benchmark requirement for any software that could have global customers or enterprise customers, whether or not localization is considered to be in the future. Note that the U/I is not changing in this phase. There is no U/I localization yet.

Even if you are actively selling only in your home country, it’s likely that you will run into customers in other countries, or your customers will have customers in other countries. At least let people enter data in multiple languages and formats. Store it, transform it and retrieve it without corrupting it.

Minimally, accents and diacritics shouldn’t cause character corruption (those square boxes and odd shapes you’ve probably seen). Better yet, add unicode support in the database and source code.  Character corruption shouldn’t be caused via issues in the various components of your product source code.

Character corruption example:

Character Corruption Example

Better if data can be stored and managed in variable formats for information such as date/time, numerical units, addresses, phone numbers and currencies.

Automation is the best approach to achieving this in a seamless, efficient and scalable manner. To that end, Lingoport’s Globalyzer can be used to scan your source code and database scripts to find these issues and guide developers to fix them. Our services team can perform refactoring work, as well.

I18n Phase 1.5: Locale Frameworks

You’ll need a locale framework for each programming language within your source code.

This paves the way for string externalization and presentation which will be needed for localization. Presentation of formats for date/time, numerical units, addresses, phone numbers, collation, currencies and more are also controlled by locale frameworks.

Lingoport’s services teams can help you make the right choices and even implement them for you.

I18n Phase 2: Language and Localization

Italy

String externalization is often what most people think of as the critical i18n and L10n step. User-facing words or strings are removed from being embedded in the source code and replaced with a function call typically to a resource file where the strings will now reside. This way, if the user selects a locale preference (remember those locale frameworks), French in France for example, the code will retrieve the French strings in the resource file for presentation.

String externalization can be tedious and time consuming. The issue is that lots of things may look like strings at the source code level that aren’t actually user-facing strings. Examples are named variables, debug statements and internal queries. Lingoport’s Globalyzer has default and extendable capabilities to aid these distinctions. Globalyzer Workbench enables an i18n engineer to assemble strings, walk through them and then externalize them in bulk.

You’ll also want to test your work. Lingoport’s Resource Manager will automatically generate a pseudo-locale that will help your team functionally test how the software will behave in another language, without the testers needing to understand that target language. Pad characters are added around the original English strings with expansion automatically set based on typical U/I requirements in the target languages. Alternatively, the expansion can be configured manually. This way, testers can immediately see any missed strings or U/I elements that won’t properly expand for likely longer words and changes in fonts in other languages (i.e., German, Chinese).

Pseudo localized page for a family tree application:

Pseudo-localization

I18n Phase 2.5: Workflow

With some software, workflow and processes are different depending on market requirements. This takes market research and coordination with in-country representation. For instance, tax management, or medical administrative software is likely to have different requirements and steps in most markets.

I18n Phase 3: Bidi Support

i18n Phases

If your product is being sold in places using bi-directional languages such as Hebrew or Arabic, you’ll need to enable and test your pages to support U/I mirroring and the bi-directional nature of text that goes right to left, but with left to right elements within. Unicode support is a prerequisite.

Ongoing i18n and L10n

Fight Mojibake!Now that you’ve internationalized and localized your software, your work isn’t over. Your teams will be steadily releasing new features and functionality. I18n surprises can arise down the line that cost time and iterations to fix. It’s not hard for a developer to make a mistake. Just as your teams may continuously measure for coding quality issues and security, i18n quality now becomes another metric.

Localization for every sprint, branch and repository makes for tedious and error prone work that slows agile progress. That process can be automated, taking your developers out of the resource file update nanny business.

Lingoport Suite’s Globalyzer continuously supports i18n from the developer IDE to source repositories. Lingoport’s Resource Manager automates resource file updates from source to translation and back again, with quality checks in each direction. QA is supported as well.

Lingoport Dashboard lets teams see and manage i18n & L10n status and process, supporting i18n issue drill downs to associated source code, issue assignment and completion. Similarly, Localization resource file issues can be itemized and examined.

We’ve seen teams go from 5-week localization update cycles to under 3-days over hundreds of repositories. Our services teams have internationalized many well known applications ranging from small to millions of lines of code, and you would be surprised to see the efficiency gains that are achievable in the development process.

We hope that you find this primer useful as you look to address i18n and L10n of your own software products. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out and a Lingoport team member will be happy to talk through the issues with you.

Other resources:

The State of Continuous i18n & L10n Survey Results

Lingoport to Lead Session on i18n for Startups at 2017 Unicode Conference

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I will be taking the stage this week at the Unicode Conference in Santa Clara with Claudia Galvan, Technical Advisor at Early Stage Innovation, to collaboratively lead the session “Practical Approach to Internationalization for Startups.”

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit corporation “devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data.” Unicode is the standard by which text is represented in modern software products, and the significance of its adoption in global software development cannot be overstated.

Translating Years of Internationalization Experience

Galvan and I bring extensive internationalization experience to the session. Galvan has led product development at Oracle, Adobe, and Microsoft, with products that have reached billions of people around the world. More recently she has focused on helping startups in Silicon Valley launch products internationally.

I founded Lingoport, the leading software internationalization company in the market, with billions of lines of code scanned, and with the leading i18n and L10n process management solution (Lingoport Resource Manager) saving clients thousands of hours each year.

Making the Business Case

All startups are not created equal in terms of funding, strategy, maturity, and stage of development. The level of cultural understanding of globalization may differ. In addition, there are differences among startups with regards to balancing the creation of technical debt in pursuit of immediate goals at the risk of introducing costs down the road.

Regardless of the startup, it’s critical that the business case is well though-out and understood. Galvan and I will be providing examples of early stage firms that baked globalization into planning once past the prototype MVP stage, as well as those who were forced to address it for a sale.

Strategy Development & Best Practices

In this talk, we will review global strategy development, addressing technical debt, defining international requirements, and i18n and l10n best practices to aid pivoting successfully an early stage startup into a global player. We’ll cover the common challenges that startups face when thinking globally, including money, time, team, and focus, not to mention the handling of diverse programming languages, internationalization and localization knowledge, and scalability. We’ll look at the requirements for successful i18n and L10n, and discuss strategies for companies to consider.

Takeaways

Key takeaways of our session will include:

  • Moving from tactical to strategic product and development planning
  • Addressing technical debt
  • Developing requirements for MVP through common user scenarios
  • Continuous systems and practices for supporting ongoing i18n and L10n

For more information on the Unicode Conference, visit the event website here.

– Adam Asnes, President, Lingoport, Inc.

Continuous Globalization Makes You Fast and Agile

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The localization industry has been late to the party regarding continuous integration (CI) of its services with software development. Continuous Globalization is finally getting the attention it deserves now, and that’s a good thing not only for the software industry but also for end users around the world. Here’s what continuous integration, and more specifically continuous internationalization (i18n) and localization (L10n) are, and what it can mean for your software development process.

The Basics of Continuous Globalization

For the uninitiated, Wikipedia defines software continuous integration, or CI,  as the practice of merging all developer working copies to a shared source repository several times a day. Multiple builds and automated tests and quality profiles are run against the code to identify bugs and other issues quickly. The sooner you find those issues, the less costly in time, effort, and money they are to fix. CI is fundamentally supportive of agile development principles. Automated quality profiles can include coding quality measurements, security, and more.

Lingoport has been working with some of the largest, well known global technology brands with its continuous internationalization suite of software, Lingoport Suite, including internationalization support for developers, QA support, and localization streamlining. These products work seamlessly with agile-friendly localization providers, providing software companies with systems and services to back up their fast moving product development efforts.

Beware the Invisible Costs

Happily, we don’t usually have to extol the benefits of CI to development teams. I’ll also note that internationalization (i18n) and localization (L10n) requirements are far more openly received than years ago.

That said, managers will comparison shop to lower localization costs per word but can inexplicably regard engineering costs involved in chasing i18n bugs, accounting for localization file updates, and iterative testing as invisible. That typical process involves manual, error-risk prone work even if there are scripts involved. If anything goes wrong with file formatting or myriad other nits, the time to trace it back and fix it eclipses a few penny savings here and there, and can be downright costly in financial terms and damaging from a brand perspective when viewed holistically.

For example, if you consider a SaaS application, perhaps with 5 to 15+ simultaneous sprints running at any given time and with three to five developers per sprint team, there is a lot of room for i18n issues to arise. The localization for any particular sprint or release might be quite small. For example: a few words added in one menu, a new error message, and some new functionality that add up to five to 10 new files with an average of 34 words needing localization per file. The minute someone has to manually handle any of that, you’re losing money and momentum. It costs far less in money and time if i18n issues are found right during day-to-day development, and the localization flow from repository to translator and back to the repository is managed automatically, including validation checks.

Dealing with Short, Fast Development Cycles

If your teams are agile (most teams are at least using some form of agile methodology now), it is particularly challenging to include both internationalization and localization processes within a two to three week or shorter cycle. However, we’ve seen clients using systems go from 5 week localization turnarounds, to three days. Consider that if your i18n and L10n are not integrated and automated within your sprints, you are defacto pushing them into the backlog. As your developers move on to successive sprints, if there is a problem with i18n and L10n that needs development and QA attention, they have to stop what they are doing, figure out what the problems are, where they are located, and fix them, and then QA must again verify that fix. That costs time, money, and momentum. It also likely means that your globalized users have to wait for new releases.

Keep in mind that many software development projects are moving to micro services architectures, which break repositories into many little components that get mixed and matched based on product configurations. This makes the business case for continuous i18n and L10n even more pronounced.

Human Factor Issues

Let me give you examples of human factor problems that cause quality, development/QA costs and localization delay issues:

A very common developer practice is to concatenate a string or message to the user. The message builds based on elements such as variables, plurals, and conditions that determine what the software needs to convey. This is how developers are taught to write code. It’s very efficient if there’s only one language involved. Even if that concatenated string is properly externalized, the word order is likely to be completely different in another language, making the translated version at best quaint, and at worst nonsensical. Since the translator doesn’t see the whole string together, they can’t produce a quality translation. However, if concatenations are found right in that day’s work for the developer, correction is quick and painless. Wait until testing, and now we have a multi-step process.

Another example is a developer not using a proper class or method that can support locale, or not passing locale to a class. Perhaps they are using a calendar class, such as SimpleDateFormat (Java). This will render a US formatted date just fine and will pass unit tests, but it’s not going to go well on a system with a different locale date formatting preference.

If you catch these sorts of issues as the developer is writing or committing their day’s work, it’s minutes to fix them. Find them later, and likely QA has gotten involved, the developer has to track down the issue (often not obvious to locate in the code), verify it’s fixed and then update a bug report. It’s no wonder these issues slip in favor of a release date.

Automation, Efficiency, and Speed

For QA, a pseudo-locale is created automatically which adds pad characters around strings so that the tester can see the U/I in English. The pad characters prove that the interface can expand to support likely longer translated dialogs and more complex character sets. Again, nobody has to remember to run a script at some point in time. The updates are automatic and continuous. When the interface is changed by the developer, the pseudo-locale update is automatically updated. This gives QA departments immediate functional U/I test cases for every new feature that confirms to worldwide requirements.

For localization, the changed U/I resource files are automatically detected. Those files are then automatically vetted for quality checks (i.e., no duplicate string IDs, proper file formatting, and more) and sent out for translation or pushed into a Translation Management System (TMS). The localization vendor, which must understand and even thrive in agile localization, then delivers the translations, which are updated leveraging a TMS, Localization Vendor Portal or other translation systems, and our Resource Manager process verifies the file formatting again and takes care of updating the source repository.

Nobody has to track down all the resource files, measure for changes, run a script, verify the file formatting, and figure out issues like duplicate string IDs or silly things like a missing curly bracket in the file format. When the translation comes back, there is no need to manually check the files again, track the fact that some translations came back before others, find a missing translation, or some broken file parameter or encoding. That’s all done. If there’s an issue, it’s clearly described and the fix is fast. If as fallible humans we were to miss any of that, it’s often not detected till much later and even so, it can be hard to unravel. Because there is no human processing delay, linguistic testing can begin faster and within context of the application.

Integrating i18n and L10n has another human factor effect that changes the cultural thinking of the company. When measurement and updating is quick, visible, and relatively painless, you change the way that developers think about globalization requirements. You’ll find teams learn to automatically think about the global implications of their development efforts and the needs of new customers, and factor that into their decisions upfront. As one executive described it, the teams moved from being like a US based company that is looking to do international business, to a global mindset, looking to write software for the world. That makes for global product leadership, rather than a simple checkmark for minimal product requirements.

Strengthening Your Competitive Edge in Global Markets

Remember, there are competitors whose primary model is to copy what is successful in some markets, but use a better localized product to outcompete dominant industry players in new markets. Internationalization and localization are now not just about reaching new customers, they are also about defending customers and capitalizing on new opportunities going forward. What some people think is good enough, is not good enough. It’s best to give your global customers a continuous, excellent, up-to-date experience, or someone else will do that for you.

Additional Continuous Globalization Resources

Six Steps to Successfully Manage Software Internationalization

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Global opportunities are going to force you to evaluate how to adapt your code and ongoing development to support localization. Sometimes it starts with a potential new partnership, sale or strategic initiative. Yet it’s not clear what will be involved for development.  When you manage internationalization poorly you create unknown risks to your budget, timing, resources and strategic objectives.

You may know some of the basics or even been through a project like this once or a few times before, but it’s typically a messy, poorly enumerated, trial and error process. It’s distracting to other development objectives while containing unknown risks to your budget and timing.

Here’s a brief guide towards a successful implementation:

1)   Learn, Build and Support the Business Case – Internationalization (i18n) and ongoing localization (l10n) is going to have a significant cost and unless the business case is defined, the project is unlikely to get done. Even if it seems like that should be sales and marketing’s job, you’ll need to have some parameters as budget can cause some trade-offs.  Companies should not go into globalizing product development without clear commitment, as a bad final product may hurt sales goals more than it helps. A failed i18n initiative can be harmful to your own company objectives as well.

2)   Clarify Your Global Release Objectives and Concurrent Development  – i18n isn’t like planning a feature release. It’s likely not to fit neatly with whatever concurrent sprint your team is planning. It touches a good deal if not all of your application, rather than being like adding a feature or fixing a bug in a particular sprint and area of your code. You’ll need a branching, merging and testing strategy that covers the full i18n scope. Keep that in mind as you go through the next two steps.

3)   Assess and Document Requirements – Establish user requirements as they relate to target locales. i18n is almost never just a string externalization exercise you can pass to an intern. You’re going to need to put some thought into locale requirements, how data is going to flow through your application, changes to your database, methods/functions/classes that will have to be made locale-aware and of course the U/I and all it’s strings.  At a higher level, there are some products that need rethinking in terms of user workflow for different countries. Write those i18n requirements down in a document. That will help you organize for the next process.

4)   Build a Plan – Tasks, Time, Cost, People and Dependencies. This is an essential step and even if you’re the type that thinks project plans are meant to be broken, you need to do this and do it to a granular level. When we work on a project we typically build a plan that starts with about 200 tasks and goes upwards with size and complexity (consider this for multi-tiered applications). To do this, we analyze the code base with our software product, Globalyzer, which gives us detailed static analysis on internationalization issues that will need to be addressed. We combine that with architectural analysis from whiteboard discussions and requirements documentation. Building a plan will give you a realistic check on the business case as well. That feedback to business case can have an effect on activities like phasing various levels of functionality if that’s appropriate to your user requirements.

5)   Reduce Risks and Manage Trade-offs – Every development project has its risks. In the case of i18n, being late is very expensive. The risk can be a broken agreement, market launch and business plan. A three month delay may make an annual revenue goal unattainable. Due to a lack of understanding of requirements and scope, poor internationalization will result in a poor localization outcome. If after all that investment, the end product can’t be properly executed, then it’s self defeating. There’s also the risk that due to distractions and/or misdirection, you don’t get the work done and the project just dies or hangs in limbo. As for trade-offs, internationalizing a large application is generally resource intensive. It’s a solid assumption that development teams don’t have lots of people with nothing to do, so in cases where you have lots of legacy code, you may need an implementation partner in order to keep up with ongoing development objectives outside of internationalization.

6)   Long Term Support – Once you internationalize and localize, your ongoing development has a new set of requirements. You’ll want to measure internationalization just like any other coding quality and ideally not have to wait until testing to find out if i18n is broken. For your ongoing agile development, it’s good to automate managing changes to strings that may change somewhat with every release. This keeps you from having to do engineering bookkeeping to process the localization of those 26 or so new words that may need translation into your supported languages in the latest sprint.

Our Globalyzer software is a keystone to our services operations when clients hire us to provide internationalization consulting and implementation for them, but it’s also important for our clients in supporting development teams in their initial and ongoing efforts to create and maintain software for global customers, faster, better and with less headaches.

Learn more about managing internationalization:

Agile and Localization:
https://lingoport.com/whitepaper-path-agile-localization/

Internationalization Planning:
https://lingoport.com/internationalization-projects-not-simple/

Measuring Internationalization and Localization:
https://lingoport.com/measuring-internationalization-lingoport-dashboard/

Painless Internationalization (i18n) for every Sprint

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Making i18n reporting and fixing easy and a natural part of development

One of the main barriers to improving i18n processes is the investment it can take in tools, systems, expertise and personnel. What if we could make it easy? No expertise needed to get started. No tools to learn – nothing to install. Lingoport’s experts set it up for you – quickly and affordably. Developers can stay on top of i18n simply and easily for every sprint. Localization teams know what’s coming and Management has clear metrics for globalization status. Sounds nice right? We’re calling it Globalyzer Express. Look below:

Screen Shot 2013-06-28 at 6.15.09 PM(click image to enlarge)

This is a top-level view of our i18n Dashboard. It’s being fed by Globalyzer command line, which is connecting to source control. All issues can be drilled down in code line detail like so:

Screen Shot 2013-06-28 at 6.21.52 PM (click image to enlarge)

Developers can concentrate on the area of code they are working on, and simply go through the issues detected and fix them. The dashboard tracks activities. You’re product is i18n ready, right in the current sprint. No buildup of i18n technical debt, and if you have i18n debt, your team can clearly work its way through it. You get real time i18n code metrics and review, rather than trying to catch up later with ad-hoc testing. This is taking the best practices of software development and bringing them to internationalization but we’ve made it easy.

Agile and Internationalization

In discussing the Globalyzer Express concept with customers, it’s clear that there’s extra benefit to this solution if the team is using Agile or Agile-like development methods. There are several reasons for this:

  • There’s no time to go back and fix i18n issues later – the team has moved on
  • Each developer can quickly navigate to their part of the code reporting, and fix or mark their issues. I18n gets distributed where it’s least costly to fix.
  • Localization teams will know what changes are coming in advance (Globalyzer Express tracks changes to resource files), and be able to verify code readiness before localization starts on fast moving updates

How does it work?

We set it all up, configure and fine tune specifically for your software. Our team lives for i18n, so you leverage that quickly. It works for lots of programming languages and database scripts. There’s no learning curve or tools configuration and analysis burden for your team.

We host it all in a SaaS configuration when granted read access to your source repository, or Globalyzer Express can work behind your firewall by installing several of the Globalyzer Suite components. You’re productive right away. As for licensing fees, it’s all quite reasonable with quarterly payments within your budget. We think you’re going to like this. We’ll be providing more details shortly, but in the meantime, contact Lingoport to learn more and get a guided tour.

 

2013 Internationalization and Localization Conference Videos

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All conference videos are available on Lingoport’s Vimeo page, here: http://vimeopro.com/lingoport/2013-internationalization-and-localization-conference

Also, see our conference photo album at Facebook.com/Lingoport

Presentation Slides

2013 Internationalization and Localization Conference

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2013 Recorded sessions are available for viewing here.

Bridging the Gap Between Software Development and Localization March 13 and 14, 2013.

Save the dates!

Lingoport is pleased to announce the return of our i18n and L10n conference, which was a greater success than we ever anticipated in its first run. For the next conference, we’re going to focus on practices, processes and technology that helps development and localization become more in tune with requirements and successful practices of releasing software that works gracefully for users worldwide.

Agenda:

Conference presentations are posted (see agenda below). Presentations will be in line with the theme of the conference, Bridging the Gap between Software Development and Localization. See below for detailed descriptions of each session.

Conference schedule:

Day 1, March 13: Technical internationalization training (View Curriculum Below)
Day 1 evening, March 13: Open reception
Day 2, March 14: Conference sessions attendees may elect to attend the training, conference day, or both.

For more information, please email events(at)lingoport.com.

*Presentations will be recorded and made available to all conference attendees free of charge.

Slideshow from 2012 Conference

[slideshow_deploy id=’5324′]

Location:

Techmart Meeting Center
5201 Great America Parkway
Santa Clara, California 95054-1122 United States

Registration & Pricing:

  • Internationalization Training, March 13: $750 US
  • Conference Day, March 14: $199
  • Both: $800 (Register for Training and select “I’ll also attend the main conference”)

2013 Conference Recordings Available Here

i18n Training Agenda

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013
8:00–9:00 Registration and Breakfast
9:00-9:30 Session 1: Introduction
9:30-11:30 Session 2: Major Concept – exercises 1, 2. Locale, Bundles, Date/Time formats, Calendars, Message Formats, Time Zone, Currencies, Locale Strategies.
11:30-12:30 Session 3: Writing systems, Unicode – exercise 3. Writing systems, Encoding, Unicode, glyphs, String handling, Collation, BreakIterator, boundaries.
12:30–1:30 Lunch and Networking
1:30-2:30 Session 4 (continued): Writing systems, Unicode – exercise 4. Writing systems, Encoding, Unicode, glyphs, String handling, Collation, BreakIterator, boundaries.
2:30-3:30 Session 5: User Interface Issues – exercise 5. LtR, RtL, Mirroring, Text sizes, Pseudo-Localization
3:30-4:00 Session 6: Input methods – setup LtR, RtL, Mirroring, Text sizes, Pseudo-Localization
4:00-5:00 Session 7: i18n issue detection and resolution in code
5:30 We round out the day with networking, dinner, and drinks.

Sponsors

Platinum –

cloudwords-logo

Gold –

Moravia WorldwideSmartling-300x134

Bronze –

SimulTranslogo_acclaro

Media Sponsor –

MultiLingual Computing

Sparkle Sponsor –

Think Latin America

Opening Reception

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013
5:30-8:30pm: Opening Reception: Drinks, Food and Networking

Conference Agenda: March 14, 2013

View our video library from the 2012 Conference.
8:00-8:45
Registration and Breakfast
8:45-8:55
Opening Talk
9:00-9:45
 A1: Squashing the Top-10 Most Common World-Readiness Bugs

Presenter:
Michael Kuperstein of Intel

Moderator:
Adam Asnes of Lingoport
B1: How Central Visibility of Translation Metrics and Process Changes an Organization

Presenter:
Michael Meinhardt of Cloudwords

Moderator:
Amanda Mork of Cloudwords
9:45-10:15
Break
10:15-11:00
 A2: Case Studies: L10n at Marin Software & Adobe

Presenters:
Knut Grossman of Marin Software
Manish Kanwal of Adobe
Lily Wen of Adobe

Moderator:
Olivier Libouban of Lingoport
 B2: Volunteer Localization at Wikimedia Foundation

Presenter:
Siebrand Mazeland of Wikimedia Foundation

Moderator:
Adam Blau of Lingoport
11:00-11:15
Break
11:15-12:15 A/B3: Demo Derby


Moderator:
Adam Asnes of Lingoport
12:15-1:45
 Lunch Break – Lobby
1:45-2:30
 A4: i18n Customer Case Study: An Adventure in Internationalization

Presenter:
Becca Gronau of Elsevier
Moderator:
Adam Blau of Lingoport
 B4: Sprinting to the Finish: 7 Tips for Successful Localization with Agile Development

Presenter:
Emma Young of Acclaro
Lydia Clarke of Acclaro
2:30-3:00
Break
3:00-3:45
 A5: How to Drive Efficient Customized Localization with Agility and Intelligence

Presenter:
Michael McKenna of Zynga

Moderator:
Tex Texin
B5: Going Global in the Age of Agile Technology: Smartling Accelerates HotelTonight Expansion

 

Presenters:
Andrey Akselrod of Smartling
Russ Taga of HotelTonight
3:45-4:00
Break
4:00-4:45
 A6: i18n QA Expert Panel

Presenters:
Tex Texin
Kent Grave
Paul-Henri Arnaud

Moderator:
Adam Asnes of Lingoport
 B6: Seven Tips to Maximize the Value of your Translation Memory Assets through a Transition

Presenter:
Adam Jones of SimulTrans
4:45-5:00
Break
5:00-5:45
A/B7: Bridging the Gap Between Software Development & Localization Panel

Presenters:
Michael Kuperstein of Intel, Michael McKenna of Zynga, Nelson Ng of Paypal and Becca Gronau of Elsevier

Moderator:
Renato Beninato of Moravia
5:45-5:55
2012 Internationalization and Localization Conference Closing
5:55-7:00
Food, Drinks, and Networking
7:00-8:00
 Monthly IMUG Meeting: Technology for Bridging Development and Localization
Learn more at http://events.imug.org/events/95268882
8:00-9:00
More Networking and Open Bar

Session Descriptions

A1: Squashing the Top-10 Most Common World-Readiness Bugs

What’s the quickest way to squash bugs? Definitely not a flyswatter, right? Using manual testing to create a world-ready product would be like using a flyswatter. To battle the bugs, let’s bring on the bug zappers and whole-house bug bombs! Relying on manual testing alone is far too uneconomical and risky for modern product development. Several modern methods have been developed for efficient software internationalization. This presentation will explore how and why internationalization methods can be used to squash the top-10 most common world-readiness failures so that publishing your software to the world can be an exciting, satisfying, and profitable experience.

B1: How Central Visibility of Translation Metrics and Process Changes an Organization

Cloudwords CEO, Michael Meinhardt will introduce the latest in multilingual content technology and Ei-Mang Wu, Sr. Global Product Manager at Marketo, will discuss how cloud technology is changing the way Marketo works across translation, marketing and product teams. Marketo trusts Cloudwords to optimize their global translation process, so Marketo can focus on building the world’s leading marketing software.  Leading companies fundamentally understand that they need to reach new global revenue opportunities quickly, and the only way to scale their process is to use innovative technology.

A2: Case Studies: L10n/i18n at Marin Software & Adobe

Marin: Business software, especially in the constantly changing environment of online marketing, requires a tighter than ever collaboration between L10n and i18n, between project management and engineering. This session will discuss how Marin follows the principle of “any user must be able to login and work in any country from any platform in any language and process data created in any locale setting”.

Adobe: Product Development Teams are increasingly becoming sensitive to the needs of internationalizing the products upfront. However legacy products who are years old, find it difficult to make code changes at a later stage. This presentation takes an example of some the market leading products that Adobe offers, explains the problems and how they are tackled.

B2: Volunteer Localization at Wikimedia Foundation

Today,  there are Wikipedias in 280 languages, and Wikimedia Incubator contains projects in over 100 more languages. Internationalization was always largely supported by volunteer developers, simply because the Wikimedia Foundation had always had a very small budget, and there were always higher priorities to deal with. In August 2011 the Wikimedia Foundation created the Language Engineering team, hired out of the volunteer community. This presentation will go in depth on how Wikimedia Foundation crowd sources as much as possible in the i18n and L10n areas, while keeping a relatively small team of people in house that ensures that the frameworks to allow distribution are created and maintained.

A/B3: Demo Derby

Fast and furious, demo derby participants will be limited to 10 minutes to demonstrate their technologies. We’ve chosen several software applications that provide productivity to bridging the gap between software development and localization. Expect quick action and not much PowerPoint. Q&A time is allotted for each presenter.

A4: i18n Case Study: An Adventure in Internationalization

One team’s experience internationalizing an industry leading, high volume, web application with a decade’s worth of code enhancements.  Explore start to finish what steps were taken and lessons learned.  Come hear from a developer’s perspective what it really took to internationalize an app.  It’s not as scary as you may think.

B4: Sprinting to the Finish: 7 Tips for Successful Localization with Agile Development

In agile development, everyone works together in a very fluid way, sprinting to the finish by tackling continual releases and every-changing assignments. But what happens when your software or web app needs to move into new language markets? How do you successfully integrate localization into an already fast-moving process? We’ll review 7 practical tips to help you fold in localization into an Agile development environment, ensuring that your new language markets don’t get lost in the race to the finish line.

A5: How to Drive Efficient Customized Localization with Agility and Intelligence

Ford recently introduced the concept of a Flexible Assembly System to allow efficient production of customized hybrid vehicles with a combination of body styles on one assembly line.  In the same way, localization of software can be run efficiently by utilizing common platforms, common processes, flexible technology, and finely tuned resource management.  This session will look deeper into each of these aspects and shed light on how Zynga is able to support a constant flow of new global games while supporting a strong mix of multilingual production games with daily releases of thousands of words.

B5: Going Global in the Age of Agile Translation: Smartling Accelerates HotelTonight

Smartling has built an agile translation management platform that guides customers through these steps to accelerate their global expansion efforts. Hear firsthand from HotelTonight a marketplace for last-minute hotel rooms, how they rolled localized versions of their app in French, German and Spanish – and how their engineering is integrating translation into their development process.

A6: i18n QA Expert Panel

Tex Texin, Kent Grave and Paul-Henri Arnaud will offer state of the art tips and lead an interactive discussion on best practices for internationalization QA. They will offer key insights into pseudo-translation, English as just another language, and testing of time zones. Join us and challenge the panel and colleagues with the your most difficult and intriguing problems. Learn how these experts and others in the industry are tackling the same issues you face.

B6: Seven Tips to Maximize the Value of your Translation Memory Assets through a Transition

Many companies lose significant savings in translation memory leveraging after making a change in development environment, release strategy, or authoring tools.  As companies move to Agile development, XML-based documentation, and globalization management systems, they often neglect the impact on the usefulness of their legacy translation memories.

During this session, we will give seven tips to maximize the value of your translation memory assets through a transition.  By employing these suggestions as your organization evolves, you will benefit from increased memory leveraging, leading to cost savings, faster localization time, and greater consistency. We will provide examples using a variety of translation memory tools, none sold, endorsed, or manufactured by SimulTrans.

A/B7: Bridging the Gap Between Software Development & Localization Panel

We wrap up the day with an expert panel to share their recommendation for how change, better support, or create your global development structure to achieve global readiness. The panel will discuss how to get started, how to improve, how to measure, what results will be expected, and what changes are necessary in an organization.

Presenters

Paul-Henri Arnaud
Globalization Process Analyst at Autodesk
Paul-Henri ArnaudPaul-Henri Arnaud (Autodesk, Inc.) is a senior process analyst on the localization services engineering team at Autodesk Development Sàrl in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. With over ten years’ experience at Autodesk and 17 years in the industry, he is a specialist in aiding development teams design, implement and test globalized applications that are used by millions of design professionals worldwide. Previously, at ViewStar Corporation, he was a key contributor to the creation and enabling of the first German, French and Japanese versions of business process and document management software. Paul-Henri holds a B.Sc. in electrical engineering and computer science from U-C Berkeley.
Andrey Akselrod
CTO, Smartling, Inc.
Andrey AkselrodAndrey comes to Smartling from his role as VP, Technology at SpaFinder, where he developed and maintained the site and eCommerce platform in 6 languages. Previously, he held executive positions at RunTime Technologies and consulted for JP Morgan Chase, where he was responsible for eCommerce, digital asset management, data warehousing and other large-scale projects. He’s a native Russian speaker. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Brooklyn College and lives in New Jersey with his wife and children. He’s passionate about all things technology, and a good cup of coffee.
Adam Asnes
President & CEO at Lingoport
Adam AsnesAdam Asnes founded Lingoport in 2001 after seeing firsthand that the niche for software globalization engineering products and services was underserved in the localization industry. Lingoport helps globally focused technology companies adapt their software for worldwide markets with expert internationalization and localization consulting and Globalyzer software. Globalyzer, a market leading software internationalization tool, helps entire enterprises and development teams to effectively internationalize existing and newly developed source code and to prepare their applications for localization.

Renato Beninato
Chief Marketing Officer at Moravia
Renato BeninatoRenato is an international business analyst and strategist. He has served on the executive teams for some of the industry’s most prominent companies, and co-founded the first market research company focusing on the language services space (Common Sense Advisory). He was the President and is currently an Advisor to ELIA (European Language Industry Association) and also a Board Member of Translators without Borders, a non-profit organization that provides translations for NGOs.

Adam Blau
VP of Sales at Lingoport
adam-blauAdam Blau is an experienced globalization executive and overseer of Lingoport’s growing account base and global outreach strategy. Adam, having lived in Germany for over nine years, is a fluent German speaker with a knack for travel. Previously, Adam worked at Milengo, where he oversaw their worldwide sales team residing in North and South America as well as Europe. Adam received his degree in economics and German from Bates College in Maine and holds a Strategic Sales Management certificate from the University of Chicago. A connoisseur of culture, Adam loves to travel (logging over 100,000 miles in 2011) and cook.
Lydia Clarke
Program Manager, Acclaro
Lydia ClarkeAs a Program Manager in Acclaro’s San Francisco office, Lydia helps clients develop and execute successful globalization strategies. Lydia has held project management, technical lead, and senior engineering positions with Acclaro and other localization firms. With ten years of experience in the industry, Lydia has successfully localized a wide variety of software, web, multimedia, documentation, and search projects. Lydia holds a BA from Cornell University with additional concentrations in Latin American studies and international relations.
Kent Grave
Program Specialist i18n and L10n
Kent GraveKent Grave is an internationalization and localization management consultant and has worked with global software for over 20 years managing large-scale projects in Europe, Asia and the United States for IBM, Siebel Systems, Microsoft and Cisco. Kent has been involved in all aspects of providing global software over the years and areas of primary interest are efficient and consistent internationalization strategy and best practices as the backbone of timely and high-quality localization. Kent grew up in Denmark and moved to California in 1990. He has an MBA in international technology management and a master’s in marketing to complement a bachelor’s degree in computer science.
Becca Gronau
Application Architect, Elsevier
Becca GronauBecca Gronau is an application architect working for Elsevier, Inc. with 15 years development experience.  A graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Becca started her career with Electronic Data Systems (since acquired by Hewlett Packard) as a software engineer.  While at EDS, Becca worked with various technologies from mainframe, to desktop, to web applications.  After transitioning to Elsevier in 2003, Becca honed a specialty in a multi-tier web development.  Becca has recent experience as the lead architect responsible for internationalizing a large, industry leading, web application.
Knut Grossman
Localization & Globalization Expert at Marin Software
Knut GrossmanFor the last 22 years, Knut Grossmann was involved in practically every aspect of localization: audio, video, documentation, animation, art, web content, and software. He started off as a freelance translator, continued to work as a project manager, and then as localization manager for companies like Consilium, NeXT Computer, and Maxis. When Maxis was bought by Electronic Arts, he continued as the Localization Director, working on such world renowned titles like Sim City and The Sims. Recently, he worked at Sony Online Entertainment as Executive Director of the International Group, and later as the principal consultant of his own firm, Games Without Borders. He now manages all localization and internationalization efforts for Marin Software, a company that provides software solutions worldwide for marketers and agencies in the online advertising business.
Adam Jones
Chief Operating Officer at SimulTrans
Adam JonesAdam oversees SimulTrans’ worldwide operations, including project management, translation, engineering, testing, multilingual publishing, account management, and marketing.  Adam has spent over 19 years directing the company’s customer outreach efforts, internal production groups, and other operations.  Relevant to this topic, Adam’s first role at SimulTrans involved analyzing projects and optimizing translation memory leveraging; he led the company’s implementation of various translation tools, including WorldServer.  Adam regularly gives training presentations at conferences of the Society for Technical Communications, the American Translators Association, the Software & Information Industry Association, and other groups.  Adam previously worked in Strategic Accounts at Oracle Corporation and as a high school English teacher.  He holds BA and MA degrees from Stanford University, in Public Policy and Education.
Michael Kuperstein
Localization Engineer, Global Language Solutions, Intel Corporation
Michael Kuperstein of IntelMichael Kuperstein has been working deep in the trenches of many localization projects, produced in partnership between Intel’s in-house localization group and Intel business units. Michael was hired by Intel in 1996 as a software engineer, later transferring to Intel’s localization team in 2001 as the dotcom bubble burst. He wears many hats as a localization engineer, software architect, application developer, tool wrangler, speaker, group historian, and all around go-to / fix-it guy for software internationalization. Armed with a vast array of creative concepts, software tools, internal social networking sites, defect reports and screenshots, financial data, and presentations, Michael is on a mission to evangelize proper internationalization and localization at Intel.
Olivier Libouban
Globalization Lead at Lingoport
Olivier LiboubanOlivier Libouban has worked in the software industry for nearly three decades as a software engineer and project manager for start-ups as well as large corporations. A native of France, Olivier has wide ranging experience in the United States, France, Switzerland and Norway with work in research and development departments as well as client projects of all sizes and complexity. Olivier has a Diplôme d’Ingénieur from the National Institute of Applied Sciences in France and a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Olivier is a sought after internationalization presenter and teacher… and also has a great sense of humor!
Mike McKenna
Senior International Engineering Manager at Zynga
Mike McKenna of ZyngaMichael is a specialist in globalization of applications and distributed systems with over two decades of internationalization experience. He is a licensed professional engineer with extensive experience consulting or leading globalization projects for a number Fortune 500 companies and has a background in global e-commerce, application design, database internals, distributed bibliographic systems, test engineering, global product management, and ethnographic research. He is currently in an engineering leadership position with the International Production team at Zynga Inc.
Michael Meinhardt
President & CEO, Cloudwords
Michael MeinhardtWith more than twelve years experience in the translation and localization industry, Michael Meinhardt, CEO and Co-founder of Cloudwords, helps companies go global by streamlining their translation strategy. Prior to Cloudwords, Meinhardt worked with organizations across various industries to localize their product, marketing, and training materials for the first time. He has also advised enterprise customers regarding their global translation strategy, including Cisco Systems, Hitachi Data Systems, Apple and Symantec.
Nelson NG
Director of Globalization Technology at PayPal
With 29 years of experience in developing globalized systems, including building the first internationalized versions of Solaris & Hotmail and migrating eBay Marketplace to UTF-8 Nelson Ng has
helped a number of companies define and execute strategies for global expansion.
Russ Taga
VP of Engineering at HotelTonight
Russ TagaRussell Taga is VP Engineering at HotelTonight, a travel start-up up with a mobile-only focus that helps people to find last minute hotel rooms they’ll love at a great price. Russ has worked for a mix of start-ups and big companies over the past 14 years including Spartan Software, Howcast Media, Adobe, Cisco, Idiom, and Accenture.

Tex Texin
Chief Globalization Architect
Tex TexinTex Texin has been providing globalization services including architecture, strategy, training, and implementation to the software industry for many years. Tex has created numerous global products, built internationalization development teams, designed best practices, and guided companies in taking business to new regional markets. Tex is also an advocate for internationalization standards in software and on the Web. He is a representative to the Unicode Consortium and on the steering committees for open source software. Tex is the owner/author of the popular www.i18nGuy.com.
Emma Young
U.S. West Coast Operations Director, Acclaro
Emma Young Acclaro As the U.S. West Coast Operations Director for international localization agency Acclaro Inc., Emma Young manages client relationships, localization endeavors and sales. She has 15 years of localization experience, with expertise in testing and QA, account management and operations. Learn how Acclaro helps the world’s leading brands succeed across cultures at www.acclaro.com