How To Make a Website “Localizable”
Ever wonder what it takes to make a website localizable?
Last quarter, the l10n-drivers set out to document the steps necessary to make a web site or web application localizable (i.e. designing a project so it can be translated and localized). All too often, we found ourselves providing feedback on projects that had begun with the intention to reach a global audience, but had not been designed to scale at the intended level.
To illustrate our point, we decided to choose a real life example that we could go through with a team of project managers to document the steps necessary to make a project localizable. What we needed was a pilot project that had launched quickly to test a concept and see if the idea had enough global appeal that it would require localization. We chose Get Personas as the test case because it fit our criteria perfectly. With this project, Mozilla Labs had a site that had launched to prove its concept. Mozilla Labs often moves quickly and may not have the time or resources to map out just what of its many projects might take off since some of them may not. In this case, Personas quickly appeared to have global appeal and a need for l10n, but it contained project design flaws that did not have localization in mind from the beginning.
After working for the entire quarter with Mozilla’s Ryan Doherty, who was charged with making the site localizable, Staś Małolepszy, with Pascal Chevrel’s guidance and some from me, compiled all that we learned into several documents now hosted on the Mozilla wiki and on the Mozilla Development Center. Our intended audience for these documents is marketing and web dev folks.
If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to make a website localizable so it can scale to a global audience, please take a look at this wiki page and its links to other important documentation.
We’ll walk through the piece of this wiki page in more detail in a few forthcoming posts.
