- From: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 12:44:52 +0100
- To: <www-international@w3.org>
After incorporating comments from the review phase, the GEO Working Group has published the article: Re-using Strings in Scripted Content http://www.w3.org/International/articles/text-reuse/ By Richard Ishida, W3C The article looks at a particular design and development practise that can cause major problems for translation of content. Many programmers and designers decide that if a particular string is used in many places, they will use copies of the same string rather than implement many identical strings. The perceived advantages to this are to save on memory, to promote consistency in the source and, sometimes, to save on translation cost. String reuse is not necessarily a bad thing. It sometimes makes very good sense to ask the translator to translate a string once rather than 50 times. The trick is to know what constitutes a good candidate for reuse and what does not. If you get it wrong, you can be creating an insuperable obstacle to good localization. You can find various news filters and RSS feeds relating to the work of the Internationalization Activity at http://www.w3.org/International/log/description ============ Richard Ishida Internationalization Lead W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ http://www.w3.org/International/ http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/
Received on Thursday, 30 March 2006 11:45:01 UTC