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The Localized website of Trigeminal Software, Inc. (English - United States)

The localized website of
Trigeminal Software, Inc.

It is hard to miss the new look of the website for Trigeminal Software, Inc. You can look at the bottom of the page and see several languages from which to choose on every page. And which page was the "default" depends on your browser's language choice. Every page on the site has been translated into at least two other languages (and in many cases more than that!). New pages are being added regularly, and more and more people are volunteering to assist in this huge effort to make the world just a little bit smaller. After all, the Earth is round, right? And the reasons for this project are fairly well outlined in that Soapbox article. But it is important to explain a little bit further, perhaps even to solicit help from those who might wish to contribute to this effort.

I was first introduced to issues of internationalization and localization while working on the Microsoft Access wizards, which are localized into 24 languages. In dealing with the myriad of bugs and problems inherent to not thinking about these issues when the code is written. I gained a greater understanding of the importance of thinking about both localization (translating the user interface to another language) and internationalization (keeping the code from running without error on another language platform) earlier rather than later in a project. Since then, I have written code and articles, done training, acted as a consultant, and answered questions on handling both of these issues in Microsoft Access and Visual Basic. In the year 2000 I am speaking at several conferences on different aspects of both concepts.

However, all the while my website was "English only", a monument to the very ignorance I was trying to help people avoid! I decided to do something about it.

There is an old Italian proverb that runs something like "traduttore, traditore," Which means "the translator is a traitor." But my hope here is to disprove that proverb, and to show that the translator is in fact the one who is stopping the treason of requiring someone who is perfectly happy with their own language to learn another (English). No translation is perfect, and both I and the people who are doing the translation work have been happy to receive corrections to typos and translation errors. And the goal has been to promote an understanding into as many languages as possible.

If you do see something that appears to be mistranslated, please send me mail at mistranslation@trigeminal.com and I will look into getting it corrected as soon as possible. And if you are interested in aiding in this effort for a single web page, the entire website, or anywhere in between, send some mail to translation@trigeminal.com and maybe we can work something out!

I would like to take this opportunity to thank some of the many people who have been aiding in this effort. This list is not exhaustive (some people want to remain anonymous!) and they are listed alphabetically. Every single one of these people has been crucial to the project and they have my deepest thanks.

I plan on trying to detail how the site is put together in some upcoming articles in various places; I will provide more information on those articles when they are released.

Articles:

Conferences:

Miscellaneous I18n resources on this site:

Michael Kaplan
Trigeminal Software, Inc.
December 12, 1999

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