Japanese Localization Help?

TwoPumpChump asks: "I'm a young engineer, with only modest programming training and experience, (Nothing to match you Gods of the code,) and I have just been assigned with the task of traveling to one of our Japanese factories to learn, then translate and localize some VB 6 code for a product line that we'll be setting up here at our American facility. The application's purpose is to run various tests using GPIB communications, with NI-DAQ hardware for instrument control and dump results into a database, all of which I'm comfortable with. My question is, before I travel half around the globe for the first time ever, is what issues can I expect when localizing Japanese code to US English and what sort of 'toolkit' should I take?"

Comments

Re:You are being tossed into the deep-end, my frie

[patio11]

Hello from Gifu-ken. Good luck, my friend, you're screwed. Localizing a medium-scale Java program from E->J is a huge undertaking, and Java is practically built around the assumption that the code will go international (native Unicode strings, etc).

Some of your challenges:

1) User expectations. Become friends with your testers (I hope you got a testing department?) and continuously ask them to evaluate whether the software works like expected. Obvious things to watch out for: date, number formatting issues, and the fact that alphabetic sort is expected to be by the table of fifty sounds, not the abc order.

2) Input verification. Strip half-width kana, save yourself a LOT of pain later. Make sure you use a consistent internal representation of Japanese (if I see another person trying to compare Shift-JIS and Unicode for equality by casting to integers and using the equals operator I will stab my own eye out with a pencil).

3) Canonicalization issues in data. Be prepared to weep tears of blood for this. My bank still hasn't figured out how to do it right, so I can't access my account online because my name is written in romaji in their database but their web site accepts only hiragana. Be especially careful with using consistent romanization. This probably means waging total war on both your users and existing data -- have fun!

4) Conversion of postal addresses. You would think this is easy, but people screw it up anyhow. Make sure any input UI asks for addresses in the order expected locally and parses them correctly! I have some business contacts in the US who have my city listed as my apartment building due to software which made assumptions about address ordering for them.

5) Suicide. Japan doesn't have a love affair with it -- thats a myth. You'll want to commit it by the end of this project -- thats a fact.