Understanding Internationalization Issues

Many developers don't consider internationalization issues when they develop a Web application today, but it's an important issue. Unless you know that no one who speaks another language will ever have any reason to access your site, you have to consider the possibility that internationalization could benefit your site. Not every site requires internationalization, but many do. You also have to consider how to handle the internationalization of your site. In many cases, you can simply ensure that the site handles more than one type of currency; but in others, you need to provide pages in more than one language. The following sections discuss these issues as they apply to Google Web Services.

Note  

Google provides support for a number of languages. However, support for non-English implementations is less than perfect. You'll find that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean requests don't work all the time. Google is aware of the problem and plans to fix it in a future release of Google Web Services.

Learning the Limits of Translation

It's important to consider not only how to internationalize your site, but also when. Sometimes the question is even "if" you should internationalize your site. Adding a second language or a second country to your site isn't a small undertaking. Even if you choose to use the least expensive approach possible, supporting two languages still means providing two sets of identical Web pages in most cases. (Some developers solve the problem by placing the language specific strings outside the application so that the content and functionality of the application are separate.) Experience shows that even with the best of intentions, one language is bound to remain behind the other in updates. Adding more languages only compounds the problem. The point is that you need to consider the monetary problems of maintaining more than one language. You need to be sure that the cost of supporting more than one language is going to result in a quantifiable gain.

The gain doesn't always have to include a monetary value. For example, you might be the librarian for your company and some employees might need to use Google Web Services in a different language. Although you can't point to a specific gain for your department, the improved performance of the employees in their department does qualify as a quantifiable gain.

However, most Google Web Services developers will need to consider the money end of things at some point. You need to perform research to discover whether the addition of another language makes sense. For example, you could include a survey on your Web site. Check for other Web sites that provide services similar to your own. In many cases, you'll see the languages these other sites support and may find that you need to support them as well to remain competitive. In most cases, you need to know that the language addition will at least pay for itself to ensure you can maintain it.

When you internationalize a site, it often means using other languages. Unless you know the target language well enough to perform the translation, you need to find someone who can translate the pages. Sometimes you can get the translation free. For example, the Free-Translation.com site at http://www.freetranslation.com/ will accept your input and output translation in a number of languages. Figure 4.4 shows an example of such a translation from English to Spanish. The free translations on this site focus on translating English to another language, although you can find some translations that go the other direction (from Spanish to English, for example). Unfortunately, the quality of the translation on these sites varies from acceptable to poor. In many cases, you'll want to use a professional translator to ensure the quality of a translation remains high. (It's interesting to note that many of the sites providing free translation services also offer paid human translations as well.)

Figure 4.4: Sometimes you can translate a limited amount of text free.

Most developers have more than just a few words to translate, and they still might not want to pay the price of using a professional translation service. You do have another option. The Google translation service works relatively well on simple Web pages. The more complicated your Web page becomes, the harder it is to get an acceptable translation. You call the Google translation service using an URL such as this:

 http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=en&u=http://www.mwt.net/~jmueller 

This URL translates my home page from English to French. All you need to supply are three items. First, you must supply the host language (the hl argument), which is a two-letter abbreviation such as en for English, fr for French, and de for German. You can find a list of standard two-letter abbreviations at http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/englangn.html. Make sure you use the two-letter and not the three-letter abbreviations. Second, you must provide a source language (the sl argument), which relies on the same two-letter code system as the host language. Finally, you must supply the URL you want to translate (the u argument). You can also access this service manually for both text and Web page translation at http://www.google.com/language_tools.

Note  

Google does support most common languages, but they don't support every language. If you see the translated page in the original language, it normally means that Google doesn't provide support for the host language. In most cases, serious translations require serious translation services. Google is currently running a beta program to provide better language support ”learn more about this program at https ://services.google.com/tc/Welcome.html.

Considering the User 's Location

The user's location affects the way you handle internationalization from more than one perspective. Of course, the first problem to avoid is confusing the user's language with the user's location ”the two aren't always the same. Someone in the United States could prefer speaking Spanish, even though the language spoken by most Americans is English. Likewise, someone in the United Kingdom could prefer to speak Hindi. However, even when you offer your page in Hindi or Spanish, you still need to consider the user's location because the location affects presentation issues, such as the format of dates.

Tip  

It's important to consider language issues when you develop a Web site. For example, many people have never even heard of Hindi, yet 180 million people use it as their first language and another 300 million use it as their second language (see http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/hindiint.html for details).