Rules to Better Internationalization

The companies that succeed globally (Spotify, Netflix, Uber) don’t just translate. They design from day one for cultural, linguistic, and technical differences.

You need to consider both technical and marketing factors. Amazon's Swedish website accidentally replaced "rooster" with the Swedish word for male genitals. An Italian company named their international site powergenitalia.com instead of powergen-italia.com back in 2003. These were more than bad translations. They revealed big marketing mistakes.

China is a booming market and now is the time to take advantage of this growing user base. If you have a successful application you should bring it to the Chinese market.

Most Chinese consumers will not make a purchase or use your application if information is not easily available in Chinese.

Localization makes your web application ready to work more than one language — and it’s much easier if you do it from the beginning. Just follow these tips to better localize your application for a specific country or region.

If you are localizing your web application to make it available in a varitety of languages, it's better to set your application default language to automatically change to local language. E.g. Make the web application default language as same as the browser language.

Localization because absolutely needed when your application has to be shown to people in many countries. To make your application more friendly, it's very important to always give the user a option to change the locale (e.g. by adding locale dropdown menu on page) and remember this choice for the future visits. e.g. To change the language for your application, you can simply choose the new language from the language dropdown.

With the increasing use of JavaScript on the client and HTML5, client-side localization is fast becoming a necessity for displaying messages, text, and resources localized for the user's culture. You can use client-side tools for localization as much as possible so that for the most part, the back end of your service remains unchanged. e.g. If you are using AngularJS, then use the Angular Translate plugin.

Knowing the context and use of certain strings will help translators choose the right translation from the beginning when you localize your web application to make it available in a variety of languages. Most translation tools will allow translators to see these comments as they translate the strings. To make your comments more friendly, it's better to list in the comment field where this text is used. e.g.

• Text
• Validation
• Tooltip
• Textbox Placeholder

Modern websites can use 3rd party dependencies from many different sources. This can include js and CSS libraries from CDNs, video providers such as YouTube and other 3rd party APIs.

Some countries (especially China) strictly control access to various international web services. Meanwhile, as geopolitical tensions escalate, many service providers are actively restricting or blocking access to their services in specific regions like China, including Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude, etc. You can use service detection to determine whether particular services are available, allowing you to fallback gracefully or use alternative providers.

To keep profile management simple and make it easier for users to have a consistent experience across applications, you should use Gravatar for showing profile images in your application.