Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lj3 3151 days ago
I don't i18n. It's a good amount of work for little benefit. I've only seen one industry capture metrics on i18n usage and that is (was?) the social games industry. All of the findings I saw pointed to the fact that even international players would prefer to play the game in English rather than their native language. I believe there's two reasons for that: to better learn English and to avoid the bugs and layout flaws that come with blindly internationalizing an app.

If you have enough customers to warrant an international version of an app, it might be worth it to completely redesign the UI around the new audience. The language used applies constraints and makes assumptions that may not be true in other languages. And then there are the culture differences...

1 comments

> All of the findings I saw pointed to the fact that even international players would prefer to play the game in English rather than their native language.

Would love to see that. In Clash Royale there's a bug that makes it show what language your opponent is using and English is not even in majority.

What's the most used language? And does that language have its own UI layout or is it just crammed into the English language UI?

I don't think I have the raw data anymore. They don't let you keep that sort of thing when you leave. :)