[dhosek]

My first job out of college involved template-based translations for chemical bottle labels (with information printed in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish, with different regulations attaching to each language (jurisdictions included the US, Japan, Canada, EU, Germany and UK, each with their own specific requirements). Machine translation was still expensive and unreliable (this was 1991–3) so we had translators build up a phrasal dictionary that we could then apply rules to in order to build up the text that would appear on each label. Thanks to the regulatory regime, there was a lot of care taken in designing the system and with hand-translation of each phrase by actual human translators, no glaring errors.

Looking at after the fact attempts at internationalization, there are lots of pitfalls and it's something that needs to be done intentionally. (I'm still thinking about how to best implement the equivalent of LaTeX's \cref for finl. What works for English, doesn't work for other languages (e.g., in Czech, “in sections 3 and 4“ would be renderered “v sekcich 3 a 4” while “see sections 3 and 4” would be “viz sekce 3 a 4” although “see sections 3–10” should be “viz sekci 3–10”.