Wednesday, March 07, 2012

#Twitter does #RTL

When Twitter started to support right to left languages in earnest, they did need localisation for their software. Given the relevance of Twitter a great localisation is important; many people will actually see it, use it.

With the implementation of RTL languages like Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew, and the simultaneous localisation there are many people who are exposed to the same issues and flaws in the software. What is so wonderful that all the people localising software find each other and work together. It is as a Saudi Wikipedian wrote on the Arabic village pump: "we all have the same problems".

Amir, one of my colleagues in the WMF Localisation team, does a fair amount of localisation on other projects in his own time. The one thing we learn from him is about cool features used in other localisation platforms.



What really pleases us is how often we learn how much the community model of translatewiki.net is valid. It does make a difference when people are not working on their own little island. Many applications are localising an upcoming release and this makes all these people testers as well. People learning together about issues and working together on solutions particularly with developers involved as well make for a perfect and agile software development environment.
Thanks,
     GerardM

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