You’re watching an amazing program on Discovery. It is about some mind-boggling natural wonder - say, the Grand Canyon, or the Amazon .. or something of the sort. You watch (and hear) in awe, as the narrator unfolds the statistics of the phenomenon. And then, in a bid to impress upon you how big the structure really is, he says “It is [insert-some-number] feet long, that’s [insert-some-other-number] New York city blocks put together”.
And
you go, “How in the world am I supposed to know how big a block
is?”. You feel anger and disappointment rising up in equal amounts.
You start trying to figure out that calculation. You miss the next
five minutes of the program. Before you know it, you’ve lost track,
and interest.
****************
Rewind
to networking class in your college days. You are studying the token
ring algorithm. Your book explains the workings of the algorithm in
detail, but every so often makes a reference to “token system in
public service office counters”. Basically the book assumes that
you are already amply familiar with this token-something-something
system, whatever it is. Forget the book, the algorithm itself makes
this assumption.
Bad
assumption, you say. You come from a country where there is hardly a
concept of a queue, let alone tokens. You have a hard time grasping
the concept. Worse, you begin hating that algorithm!
****************
Okay.
I admit that was exaggerated. But the fact remains.
Internationalization
has gone from being a best practice to becoming an absolute
requirement in most software applications.
How
widely a software is adopted is directly tied to how usable it is by
people all over the planet.
These
days it is pretty standard for any application development framework
(language/platform/stack) to provide techniques for developers to
easily internationalize their applications. Display messages, units,
currencies are all externalized from the code itself. Heck,
developers don’t even write the display messages - that task is
outsourced to translators.
But,
is this sufficient? Would people the world over be happy if their web
app displayed messages in their language, Rupees instead of Dollars,
and kilometres in place of miles? I think not. In this series of
posts, I will present my argument on why I think the software world
is still a far cry from being truly global.
Stay
tuned for Part 2 of this series, which will talk about cultural
sensitivity.
