Another surprising fact:
I have nearly as many North-American customers as European customers for my localization tool!
Americans and Canadians are not the arrogant American-English-is-the-only-language-that-matters people one might think they are 
Your conclusion might be surprising for some, but for me is just plain fact.I live in Dominican Republic, our official language is spanish, most developers if not all here prefer all their software (dev and no dev) in english. I think is just a matter of concistency, we read, work and sometimes even talk in our workplaces all day in english.
So keep up the good work...in English
As a german developer I'm not surprised about your experiences. In nearly all cases i like to have a good, working software in english, instead of a broken software that is localized by some translator that knows next to nothing about the context of the application. (it happens, often).
But if you target end users or companies with offices in lots of different countries that need localized versions because their local production staff cannot read english, localization gets more important. Its asked for all the time.
Your assertion is true, but only for certain type of software and for some parts of the market.
The broader the market, the lesser true is the assertion.
There may be no demand for localisation for source control, but if really intend to package the full monty you talked about not so long ago, with issue tracking and what not, then it is a different matter.
A German friend of mine needed to find a issue tracking product for use within the government department she works for. The availability of a German version was not optional - no German UI, no sale.
(PS: Isn't it ironic that the spelling of the word "localisation" is dependent on your locale.)
I'm a German developer, and I always install the English/Intl versions of my development tools. And I don't know any developer who would install the German ones. Why? (1) Most localizations of dev tools are really bad style. (2) Some words are translated into german words no developer would ever use. (3) Some translations are simply wrong, and so they are hard to understand (you have to translate to English to get the point). (4) With german error messages, it's very hard to find a solution in the (mostly English) newsgroups or blogs.
I wonder how valid a conclusion you can draw given the population: French people who speak French only don't go to TechEd in Spain since obviously nobody speaks French there!
But it certainly indicates a trend. As far as development tools are concerned, as other commenters pointed out.
The big difference is that you are selling tools for developers. You can't be a software developer without being proficient in English - major things like the Java API docs might be translated, but anything less general, and the documentation will be english-only.
Now selling, say, an Office suite in English only would be completely impossible (except countries like India or Puerto Rico where English is the lingua franca of college-educated people).
One more point: translation does not always matter, but localization does - think 6:15 p.m vs 18.15, mm/dd/yy vs. dd.mm.yy etc. Palm, for example, where often derided in Germany for their "weird" Contacts application, simply because German like their zip code in front of the city, not after it, and never use a "state" line.
Well, people said it nicely. Your product is aimed at developers, and they by definition speak or at least understand English. After all, there are no für-loops or público methods...
A slight variation on most of the above comments is that, even if most developers do speak English, locali{s|z}ing on a non-English language means that all of your developers have to speak that other language. When was the last time anyone's dev team all spoke a common language other than English?
Just wanted to chime in with what Elmar said. English is fine just as long we get to keep our strange date formats and weird symböls.
Ruby came from Japan, but it's standard string methods like .length count bytes -- not characters.
I had a hunch that this was because they used U. S. english for almost everything related to programming - but this confirms it.
I think all you really need these days, for software being used in the industrialized world - is english-based software that accepts Unicode in large blocks of text. I imagine this would be easier if Ruby improved built-in Unicode support.
Even if that's not the case, it doesn't seem to totally discourage people from using it.
Now, of course, in developing nations I imagine there are people that don't speak English, and to develop they need to be able to learn to use a computer. They also need to learn English, though, and that might be first on the list.
Stefan Schultze > (2) Some words are translated into german words no developer would ever use. (3) Some translations are simply wrong, and so they are hard to understand (you have to translate to English to get the point). (4) With german error messages, it's very hard to find a solution in the (mostly English) newsgroups or blogs.
Damn, Stefan beat me to it 
Indeed...
1. software is usually translated either by translators who don't know enough about things computer, so the translation just doesn't make sense. Even for developers who aren't very good at English, it's faster/safer to read the original
2. If I get an error, I'll get more help if I post the error message in English. Having to re-translate it myself usually means more questions. For example, I had a problem with an add-in product for the VB IDE, but didn't know what word in English matched that word, so I ended up using "add-on" -> someone asked me what I mean. Had I had been running the English version of VB, that problem wouldn't have occured
3. Finally, localization IS important when you sell software meant for the unwashed ma... sorry, the general public SourceGear is sold to a small minority of computer users who are used, and often actually prefer, to use US software in their original version, but it's far from being true outside of that demographic.
You'll hit the localization issue again when you hit the chinese (or the japanese?) market. The thing that struck me when I visited Tokyo: People go along perfectly w/o any english and are high tech at the same time. I guess it depends upon the momentum in a country, whether a industrialized country can afford to ignore the western way of doing things.
on the other hand, most shortcuts for menu items/actions are different in localized versions. I therefore prefer to use the english versions of vc6 and now vc.net 2003 (things like reaching the batch build dialog by keyboard only). Also translations sometimes suck (in my case: german) ...
You know what they say about assumptions? We've been paying the price lately at work.
Dennis
If your users are not asking for localization, then why worry about it? This was definitely a great opportunity to get feedback from that demographic and they clearly don't need localization for your products.
Localization is critical for certain types of appplications but given the global nature of software development these days, it's hard to argue against English being the universal language in this space.
To echo some of the other comments. I used to work for a company that did business planning software. We did do French and German translations of the software, but those often lagged well behind the English version. But the English version always supported date and number localization solidly. Why? Because customers would grumble about the language issue, but dates and numbers were a deal breaker. Surprised me at the time, but it seems to be the way it is.
Quality of translation is a major factor in discouraging users to adopt a localized version. Concepts and terminologies are very difficult to translate successfully from one language to another. It's much easier to read 'Using Events in ActiveX Controls' in English than '使用 ActiveX 控制項的事件' in Chinese because you don't need to do a 'double translation' in your head (in my case, Chinese words ->English words-> Concepts).
Wow, do you actually sell non-localized software to Japan? Our Japanese sales figures are a mistery to me -- we sold about the same nunber of licenses in Japan as in Malawi, Micronesia, New Caledonia or Dominica. Actually, we sold 15 times more on Faroe Islands.
As Japan has a technology-centric and wealthy economy, I always thought that poor sales figures are primarily due to the lack of localization (even though our software is used by system admins, who usually speak English to some extent).
Apparently, localization is not the problem, so I think the other reason might be what I read a couple of years ago, namely that Japanese companies do not buy cheap stuff, because they believe that low price always comes with low quality. While this is a reasonable assumption, Japanese are a lot less pragmatic in this regard than their European or American counterparts.
Maybe we should release a Japanese version of our software with an 5x price tag and see what happens.
your comments are correct: you sell to computer programmers, which usually use English. personally, even my MS-Word menus are in english and not hebrew. that's the way god intended window menus to be. but this is not the case in supporting the strange character set we call our language. as a customer i've asked (and you guys did it) to add support in vault and dragnet for comments in hebrew (we call it hebrew enabled, after the win95 version which supported hebrew text but had english UI). I also think that unlike vault, dragnet should be translatable, and then my test stuff and helpdesk might actually use it.
Hi Eric,
I'm glad that you liked Barcelona and Spain (I'm from Madrid). I was also in the TechEd.
About your localization thoughts:
- In Spain, all client computers are in Spanish and Office is in Spanish. Spanish people does not use English on a daily basis. Only servers can be in English because admins think that "service packs come sooner...".
- Developers are a different group because English is the language used by the programming languages, although we usually write the variable, procedure names, etc in Spanish. They seem to tolerate English in the IDE and many shops install Visual Studio in English despite there is a Spanish localization. So, it's only natural that a source code control provider is in English too.
- But workers in a company don't tolerate English. If you think about installing Team Foundation Server or your planned equivalent to offer work items tracking, reports, sharepoint sites, etc., you are better off offering it translated to get sales.
- As someone has pointed out, even if the software is English, we expect it to honor the Regional Settings for dates, hours, first day of week and so on.
Best regards,
Carlos Quintero
MVP, MZ-Tools
I guess this really depend if all your client know English or not, I am pretty sure there are someone at the earth using computer but don't know English...
Of course, obvious those computer user who don't know English probably not a developer
I think Kevin made some interesting points.
I am a native english speaker (Australia) but I have managed to install & configure apps which were in Chinese.
One problem that even I had with American applications is the date format. After thirty years of dd/mm/yyyy I have to think everytime I do mm/dd/yyyy.
This is ok if there is one date but if there are hundreds of dates that you have to match up it is a disaster waiting to happen.
Localization does matter.
Localization is evil.
When we, developers, are localizing our products, we "...go down [to the people] and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." with our own hands.
(http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?
search=genesis%2011;&version=31
Using a common language means better understanding each other, share our culture, learn from each other. Where the culture of common language exists (such as in the computer world), it should be praised and encouraged.
Luke, non-English speaker
1) If I had a choice between good Polish and English versions of the same product, I would pick English every time.
2) This point was raised here before: software development is such a dynamic field that often direct transalations don't make much sense. "Firewall", "router", "method signature"... How do you translate that and maintain context? It's almost like the current English terminology evolved over time and is built on layers upon layers of mental abstractions. You would have to port all that to preserve context, so it's pretty much undoable. And for me to read Polish, go back to English for context, and then back again to Polish is just waiste of time and brain cycles. I'm not going to make myself labor over every second word or phrase. English is just easier.
3) Date, time, numbers (commas vs. periods) need to be localized as they are simple concepts not requiring context, so direct replacement works.
Localization is really-really hard to do right. Because of that most developers prefer English versions. But that's just developers.
I strongly agree with Stefan Schultze. I avoid germanized software like the plague. A wonderful example of "germanization" was in some ASP code that was shipped with IIS 5 in W2K Server: they "translated" the goto statement to "go to" which obviously didn't work.
And to further what was said about keyboard shortcuts - usually they manage to keep most shortcuts from one version to another. A few are always broken but some companies do get this right. With a localization you can bet your life that almost no shortcut will be the same as the version before.
I had a discussion much like this with a developer coworker - he's a native Italian who has worked on ASP.NET applications for the past 5 years in Colombia. Most of the software he uses at home (such as Office, VS, Corel, etc.), he purchased in Colombia, but he refused to buy the Spanish versions. His complaint - the menus and dialogs are all too long and too confusing. Spanish has a lot of sentence reordering and explicit possession articles, even for very short phrases. I'm sure this holds true for several other languages as well.
Yes, at least in Germany no developer really cares about localisation. First of all: Even if your english is really really bad you still can figure out what stuff means or you just "know" it. I mean, "File -> Open" isn't news to anyone.
The second reason are bad translations. Nice story: I used Visio for some time to model UML diagrams. Now there is a translation error in the german version. You know how you can define function parameters as either "in" or "out"? Some smart translator thought that the "in" actually means "inch" and thus translated it to "Zoll", the german word for inch.
There are now a lot of UML - Diagrams circulating in Germany that have all kinds of "Zoll" and "out" parameters. It's ridiculous. This is Visio 2003 Enterprise with the latest SP. After a while you just stop bothering about it and use the english versions of any software you use.
I'm Finnish and I prefer my software in English. I guess it's a consistency thing. Also English is currently the obvious choice for international communication. Which is why "everybody" writes their software, documentation and general stuff about general things(especially computer (science) related) in English. However, I recognise that most computer users will probably want their software localized. But it is very important that the translator of the software is knows well i) the target language, ii) related terminology in target language and iii) the software being translated. There's a lot of translatations out there that just make my head hurt.
I speak Flemish (the version of Dutch spoken in Flanders - Belgium)and I would like to see all software English-only. Although I like my language very much and I'm not exactly Anglophile, software should be in English. In my more then 20 years of IT-support I haven't yet met one user who wasn't capable of using English software if he made a little effort. After all using most software is down to understand less then 100 terms. Localization should be limited to unicode and local versions of date, time, currency, etc. Also problem solving is much easier with the original error messages than with bad translations. Sadly enough here in Belgium we are legally obliged to provide our employees with translated software unless there is no other version available.
I have no idea why do you feel guilty about it. See, I'm Hungarian (living in the UK). What chance do I have to talk to somebody from Greece or Spain except for English? It's just became the least common denominator, probably because of it's simplicity. The spread and popularity of English must be the first concern for everybody who wants to be able to communicate with everybody all over the world. And if software promotes, so much the better.
There is a difference between developers and "normal" users. I work on a project which is undergoing localisation just because the user wants so. My feeling is that developers want to have it in english just because it feels strange to read "undantag" when it is named "exception". We develop in english, write method names, field names, comments all in english; and thus we want the developer tool to have english.
Interesting post; and possibly the most interesting comment is Stefan's: specifically, point (4).
People in the software business tend to think of their core "product" as code. Obviously, the code could be written in Japanese characters (pick one of three sets) if everyone agreed to program in Ruby.
Beyond that, if you can tear a developer away from their screen, they might admit that design documents, user documentsm, and even -- perish the thought -- sales and marketing documents should be accessible in any language.
(Incidentally, I've been installing Chinese hardware with, hem, challenging English translations for the last five years or so; perhaps the question is entirely moot>)
However. Most people, anywhere in the world, want one thing and one thing only from their software. It works. It keeps on working. And, if it breaks, there's a way to fix it.
(OK, that's three things, and they ain't even consistent. Never mind.)
I'm English, I speak English, I can adapt without too much trouble to American English. When things go wrong, I look for an English solution. Is this because I'm English?
No, it's because I can cut and paste the error message (or whatever) and throw it into Google. This works to an astonishing degree, however obscure the problem (eg translating C++ pthreads to Perl 5.8 ithreads via SWIG; now, that's bloody obscure).
80% of software difficulty is out there in the wild, after you release it. It seems to me that a combination of Google and a lingua franca (ironically nether Latin nor French) is quietly taking over the "idea space" of internationalisation.
Don't get me wrong, I think everybody should code to I18N, simply on the basis of programming for the future. I just don't think that it is as important as various consultants, etc, might claim.
I would claim that your software isn't actually in English. It is in a technobabble that uses English words but has specific meanings. For example messages like "fork failed - virtual memory exhausted", "failed to initialize 3d vertex" or "Rescan class dependencies" have no meaning to people outside of the field. There is no need or benefit to translating that into other languages since it won't make much sense there either.
On the other hand, software that my mother would use (tm) does need to be in the appropriate language. ie Word should be translated, source code control systems don't need to be.
Well I work in a japanese company and I must say that most of the staff does not really speak english and tend to prefer using japanese applications for that reason (like a buggy impractical issue tracking software but that is in japanese)...
So I would think that if the japanese version of SourceGear didn't sell so much, I think it's probably more a problem of marketing than anything else...
I guess the people who found about SourceGear are the few english speaking programmers who learned about it through english website and of course requested the english version....
The rest of non english speaking japanese software developper probably didn't hear about it and therefore were not interested in SourceGear....
This is definately a case where the product (source code control) is one of a bunch used by one person for a whole job, and I suspect that it's significantly better if all the tools have a common language. If you speak english and something else and use 5 tools with only one of them using your native language, switching languages back and forth is going to be annoying.
So what I'ld say is find out what other (complementary, rather thanjust competing) software is being used at the same time as your product, and follow what localization they do. If they do none, still consider it, but it may be less important.
Please localize your product.
Thanks.
I'm Russian, and I can easily use any mixture of Russian and English-language software. Same applies to most of my work colleagues, but of course not to my mother - so yes, if you're targeting software developers - keep it English. Otherwise, localize.
I'm dutch, and I prefer my developer tools in english.
A problem when you start translating some developer tool, it becomes difficult to decide where to stop translating.
For instance, if you have an API, do you translate you commands?
If you do, your code won't work on versions with another language. (Microsoft does this with it's office basic commands, and that is a real pain in the ass to work with).
If you don't translate them, it means that as a developer you have to deal with two terms for everything, and it is not always obvious what exactly is meant by a translated term.
So, for developers, it is actually a lot easier to have things in one language.
Dates have already been mentioned, but other things can be even more significant.
Which is the larger number: 1.234 or 1,234 ?
That would depend on whether you come from Germany or England (and possibly other places, but that is an example from my recent work). The meaning of the dot and comma in numbers is the opposite in Germany from other places that I am familiar with.
I was born and rasied in Northern IL (about 3 hours north of Eric) and I will only use software written in "Naukanski". It's an Eskimo Yupik language spoken be me and about 100 other people on the planet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yup.../
Yupik_language
So Eric, as soon as you get the "Naukanski" translation done you will have one more sale!!!
Our Naukanski localization is scheduled to happen shortly after we do the Klingon version.
Hi, I'm italian and I strongly agree with Stefan Schultze: most of the localisation is simply bad or even wrong, so why expecting some technical tool to talk in my language ? It is better to expect that the software works well ...
And, well, I don't agree with Luke: there is a lot of applications and users, out there, that NEED localisation. Discovering whether you need to localize or not seems most of the time to be a marketing choice.
Eric:
I can help you with the prioritization of Naukanski. (Which is an odd thing to say, coming from the West Midlands of England.)
A Klingon search site is available at:
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-klingon/
... which should help with your obscure Mid-Western error messages.
Haven't found one for Naukanski, so you'd better get internationalizing fast.
Other than currencies, dates, numbers in general, and the correct dose for medicine (high on my agenda, since my Mother is dying downstairs even as I type), I'm not sure that internationalization is worth the candle when you've got Google, and even Babel (not actually a bad site).
Let us know how sales to the Eskimos are doing. (Heck, you can always switch into refrigerators and let GE deal with the language problem.)
--Pete
As others said, developers have to know English anyway. I'd like add one more reason along this line:
Not all software is translated (esp. dev sw). When it is, translated versions aren't always available right away. So a dev would end up with at least some english sw.
And it's much less confusing (to me at least) to install a US-English OS, and all software as well, then to permanently translate in my head between 'file' in one software and 'bestand' in another, with different accessor keys, menu shortcuts etc. (It would be confusing even to have it in english at work and in dutch at home. If Alt+F then O does not give me an open file dialog, the computer needs fixing to me
Eric, we are from Russia, and I can say that English wersion seems apropriate for us, (I mean menu and other visible stuff), except one thing - file names. Since Source Safe is localized, we tryed a link between SS and SOS (ver 3.5), and found - we cannot managed Russian filenames. That was bad for us.
"If your users are not asking for localization, then why worry about it?"
Because you'd like to get more users.
The only issue I have with this is that I have to put up with American English.
I really hate American English.
Hello all,
As a person who has worked both sides of the fence. I would just like to add my views:
1) I agree entirely about poorly translated software and that an English version is far better than a version mistranslated (particularly liked the MS Visio example)
2) To defend translationlocalization: Poor translation is a direct result of the following:
A)The sheer lack of thought developing a product for the international market. This is due to the fact that developers in the US and the UK speak and understand only one language: English! They have no desire or need to learn about the cultrual nuances and complexity of language for a foreign market.
B) The fact that product developers are only willing to spend peanuts on good translation. If you want a rolls royce then be prepared to pay!!
C) The translationlocalization industry has become a comodity market where cheapest always wins!! If you want dirt cheap German translation, I know a company in India that will do it, but you will end up with widespread mistranslation.
I could go on and on (But I won't!!)
Cheers
I'd much prefer to use all software in English, unfortunately the world of computer science is standardised on American. 
Just because I'm being facetious doesn't mean I don't have a point but I'll spare you the boring details...
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