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by bananarchist
1452 days ago
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> Single Source of Truth for certain presentation decisions. You can't have a single source of truth for presentation decisions in a multilingual product. Different languages have different typographic traditions, will demand different minimum container sizes based on word lengths and maybe this is shocking but they sometimes run in different directions. If you are not integrating the dev, design and localized copy editing roles on your team, your product is going to look like trash except where the primary language of the team is concerned. Translation can scale for large products, but localization cannot: until further notice, you can only do it the hard way, or the wrong way. |
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Maybe this is shocking but I'm fluent in a language that is sometimes written veritcally.
"You can't have one single common presentation for every translation" is true in an absolute sense but often not true in practice – eg) we hit most of Europe and North, Central, and South America with ~10 static translations rendered into one common presentational template, none of which run into any of the truly complex layout differences that right-to-left or vertical presentations would bring. We extensively QA all of the languages we do support, and presentation issues are truly pretty damn rare. It's your classic "80% of the result for 20% of the effort" tradeoff.
Now, if you truly do need to localize in every language under the sun then yeah, something like this can make sense, as it gives you maximum flexibility wrt to varying your layout alongside the translation.
But if you have any simpler use-case (eg. supporting just English, Spanish, French and Portuguese will give you an enormous chunk of the planet with minimal overhead, as they have very similar word lengths and presentation requirements) then the approach here is just taking on all of the effort and maintenance overhead of the maximally-complex case when you have absolutely no need to.