{"id":114,"date":"2008-08-20T22:36:02","date_gmt":"2008-08-21T03:36:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/20\/hardwired-strings\/"},"modified":"2008-08-20T22:36:04","modified_gmt":"2008-08-21T03:36:04","slug":"hardwired-strings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/20\/hardwired-strings\/","title":{"rendered":"Hardwired Strings"},"content":{"rendered":"

With every programming language\/development environment I know of, you have to do extra work<\/em> to make a string localizable. For example,
\nerrorMessage = NSLocalizedString(<\/strong>@\"This is hard!\",@\"\");<\/strong><\/code>
\nnot simply,
\nerrorMessage = @\"This is hard!\";<\/code><\/p>\n

And it’s not just extra work, it’s a ridiculous amount of work.<\/em> E.g. to create an Objective-C string, you just put an @<\/code> in front of a standard C string. But to create a localized string, you have to surround your string in ()<\/code>‘s, and prefix it with a seventeen character mixed-case function-name, and finally add an empty “note” for the translator. (Rarely, you may want<\/em> to add a note for the translator, and it’s good that you can, but you should not be forced<\/em> to write something when it is not necessary.)<\/p>\n

There isn’t really an excuse for this; it’s just how languages have lazily evolved.<\/p>\n

Non-localizable (“hardcoded”) strings are a huge<\/em> issue, even though they are trivially simple for programmers<\/em> to fix. The problem is that translators do not work with source code, they work with resource files. So when they find a “hardwired” string that must be changed in code, they tell a programmer to fix it<\/em>. And that communication is slow and costly. Especially when you consider that good localizers are probably native to the place they are localizing for — meaning that having a real-time conversation involves at least one party staying up past 3AM.<\/p>\n

I dream of a day where \"this would be localized by default\"<\/code>; \"and\"(\"syntactic sugar for adding optional translator notes would be there too\")<\/code>; and creating C\"literal C-strings\"<\/code> would be easy.<\/p>\n

“Unicode support libraries” are doomed to institutionalized-failure, because they will never make it easier<\/em> to do the right thing. It must be so easy to create a localizable program that you wouldn’t dream of doing anything else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With every programming language\/development environment I know of, you have to do extra work to make a string localizable. For example, errorMessage = NSLocalizedString(@”This is hard!”,@””); not simply, errorMessage = @”This is hard!”; And it’s not just extra work, it’s a ridiculous amount of work. E.g. to create an Objective-C string, you just put an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,12,5,4,8],"tags":[144,142,141,140,139,143],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accessibility","category-design","category-objective-c","category-programming","category-usability","tag-documentation","tag-i18n","tag-internationalization","tag-l10n","tag-localization","tag-translation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}