[obscurette]

Localization is treated as translation job in whole tech world, but in reality it should be a UI/UX design job. Most of localizations are awful even by translation standards though. And not because it lacks some kind of context etc, but nobody just cares – these are done by big agencies using mostly automatic process and with prices racing to the bottom.

PS. I have 10+ years experience with open source localization and tried to make it my job at some point. I escaped industry very quickly.

[hrpnk]

+1 to that. If you design UIs, you need to understand concepts like Right-To-Left, one-few-many for numbers and counts, etc. Same for phrases that use different typefaces with an aim of concatenation (e.g. "red" + "apples") where other languages may have more than 2 words or need a reverse order (e.g. "apples in red").

Modern UI design tooling allows for integrations with Localization Management Systems, which will perform automated translation or pseudolocalization in order to allow the designer to preview how their text looks like in another language or length.