Living in a Multi-lingual World: Internationalization in Web and Desktop Apps

Modern web applications pose a special challenge for developers that want to internationalize applications in order to address the European market: In the past, when applications have been a single more or less monolithic block, translation was hard, because all language-specific parts of the program code had be identified, extracted, translated, and merged back into the application, ideally everything on the fly.

With Web 2.0 applications this is not getting easier, as today there is not only one single point of translation, but four:
* the server-side web-application code
* the client-side web-application code, mostly Javascript resources
* the end user documentation on the web site, and
* often additional client programs to provide desktop integration

Additional challenges posed in web applications are:
* how to detect the language of the user * how to deal with graphical text, and
* how to internationalize user-generated content

In this talk, Lars Trieloff uses the example of Mindquarry GO, an open source collaboration software to demonstrate how to unify internationalization of server-side and client-side web applications, how to integrate internationalizable end-user documentation and how the same process can be applied to desktop applications leading again to a single point of translation, which means a lower barrier to translations and more web applications in your mother language.

The second part of the talk covers issues even more specific to web sites that use fine-tuned graphic text design, have visitors of different language preferences and how to enable cross-lingual sharing of user-generated content.