Top Ten Internationalization Mistakes to Avoid

This is a summary of an article written by Adam Asnes of Lingoport. For the full article, visit https://lingoport.com/internationalization-management-mistakes 

Sometimes the best way to learn is through mistakes you have made in the past. While this may be true in the personal arena, making mistakes in business is costly. Lingoport has seen a number of internationalization mistakes cost companies money in the past. Here’s a list of the top ten problems businesses looking at internationalization need to realize.

  1. Don’t forget what drives internationalization: new customers in new markets
  2. Don’t assume internationalization is just an older software legacy issue: no framework, however new, is capable of internationalizing itself.
  3. Don’t assume you can treat internationalization like any other feature improvement when it comes to source control management.
  4. Don’t assume internationalization is just a string externalization exercise: the scope of i18n is much greater.
  5. Don’t wing it on locale: be sure to consider both language and location.
  6. Don’t create your very own internationalization framework: speak to somebody who has done it before.
  7. Don’t think that the team internationalizing your software can work without a working build: developers should be able to test as they go.
  8. Don’t run out of money: projects suffer from underscoping, resulting in costly release delays.
  9. Don’t use a half thought-out character encoding strategy: use Unicode.
  10. Don’t use your same testing plan, or just rely on localization testing, when your functional testing needs to grow to include internationalization requirements.

For full details, read the full article here: https://lingoport.com/internationalization-management-mistakes

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