Localizing HTML and Javascript. Part 1: Localizability check

Localizability checks are performed to identify elements in source material that could potentially cause localization issues and lead to delays. The purpose of such checks is to ensure that text, images, and layouts are localization ready. For instance, a website that is built to allow for text expansion, prevent truncation and font corruption, support right-to-left (RTL) languages, and is flexible with formatting will be significantly easier and faster to localize without running into costly delays due to design limitations after the product or campaign has launched.

Soto Galindo, E. (May 2022). Localizability and Culture Checks. Multilingual. Retrieved from https://multilingual.com/issues/may-2022/

This task may fall to a variety of different technical team members in an organization: developers, internationalization engineers, localization quality engineers, localization quality testers.

Software should undergo a localizability check before any localization begins because the findings may require some code to be rewritten. If the check is done after localization is completed, an organization runs the risk of catching errors after spending development and localization resources on that content. The cost to fix an error that is in production is much greater than fixing an error early on.

In a class on software internationalization, the first real assignment was to perform a quick localizability check on a simple HTML page and then improve the localization. Since the assignment was purely introductory, it was straight forward.

Try doing a quick localizability check of the English and French versions below so you can compare your findings with mine.

Did you catch the untranslated text, the date/time formatting, or the business name that should be left untranslated?

Here’s everything I saw:

Read next week part 2 to see the code and how I revamped its localization. And for more details about localizability and culture checks, read the article I link to in the opening quote. Nothing to lose!