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Rules of thumb in making software that is actually localizable

Over the past few years, I’ve participated in localizing quite a few diverse bits of software. This includes desktop applications, content management systems, websites, and even an SMS service.

While gaining that experience, I’ve noticed some patterns and practices that the developers often apply without realizing how harmful their use can be to the localization quality of the end product. In fact, I suspect that pretty often those practices are being thought of as helpful, and not harming… Until it’s a little too late: code has been written and tested, and rewriting it would cost lots of both time and money.

Toliau skaityti Rules of thumb in making software that is actually localizable

UTF-8 in IRC

I’ve read this post of Q-FUNK.

Some thoughts about that:

What if someone recycled Gaim’s encoding detection bits into an IRC server patch that does the reverse action: order anyone whose client outputs non-UTF encoded 8-bit to reconfigure their character-set to UTF-8?

That’s the easy part. ICONV does charset conversion, and in case input or output charset is wrong, it exits with an error, or converts every unsuitable character into a questionmark. Then, I guess, you can simply use something like this: Toliau skaityti UTF-8 in IRC