Michael Hatscher, Senior User Interface Manager at the Interactive Design department in the Hamburg office of AOL Germany, who is running a blog around usability at AOL (AOL Usability-Newsletter) asked me some questions about my new role and responsibility at AOL.
The original version of this interview can be found here.
The translated article:
I18N, L10N …? An interview with Marcel Becker
I18N and L10N should not be confused with code names for secret airplanes or something. Instead they are abbreviations for principles in software design. I18N stands for “Internationalization” (”I”, 18 letters, “N”), L10N for Localization (”L”, 10 letters, “N”). The AOL Usability Newsletter talked to Marcel Becker, Technical Manager International Portal & Products at AOL LLC.
Michael Hatscher (MH): Marcel, in short, how would you describe your new role?
Marcel Becker (MB): I have two main tasks: leading and guiding the internationalization of products and the technical lead for international portal development. You can not really separate the two since they depend on each other. Building internationalized products basically requires the development teams to make the products localizable. This means they can easily be translated into the respective target language (and use the appropriate char set etc). Regarding the portal task, the challenge is to build one global platform which can be used for any country - or at least sub systems or components of it for smaller portals. In addition I am a Tech Lead and lead other dev leads and architect who are working on and coordinating the actual projects and products.
MH: What do you think might be the challenges you will be facing?
MB: The biggest hurdle is probably to create or increase the awareness among the colleagues in the US that we are building products for a global market - not just for a single country like the US. Not all of the teams are thinking this way yet. It will all be about getting them to understand the principles behind I18N and act accordingly. It’s basically evangelism if you like.
Documentation and checklists will be key. Together with the colleagues in Dublin, responsible for L10N we created the first version of an I18N-checklist. In addition we will be using a wiki to document what we’re doing and to collect essentials around I18N and international software development.
At our office in Mountain View we conducted a first survey to understand how the development teams there look at I18N, discover open issues and to get a first status on our overall I18N readiness. We will collect the feedback from the survey to further develop both survey and documentation around I18N. The later should then be used as checklists during the normal software development cycles.
My new role is essentially a new position, since these kind of tasks were traditionally spread across various teams within the company (Dublin for example, who - due to the nature of their tasks - could only react on product specific issues - and only at the end of the software development chain)
MH: What is especially important when developing applications for an international audience?
MB: Personally I think the most important thing is to separate application and presentation layers. That’s not only important for I18N but also to achieve a greater flexibility and to allow better maintenance of the overall product. On the presentation layer itself, content and layout/design should really be separated. This includes strings, configuration files, images and other files which essentially describe the look and feel of an application. This modular approach will allow much faster development of applications and deployment in various countries. You may enable or disable features without touching the underlaying application itself. Of course every major feature and component of the application has to follow the same guidelines and principles, use the same presentation layer and technology to really take advantage of this approach.
MH: Are there any tools or processes you have had good experiences with?
MB: I18N and L10N are more like principles and attitudes which define how you actually develop a product. It is absolutely important that developers will follow established guidelines and are using standards to develop software. Sticking with legacy or non-standard approaches will not just mean additional work for maintaining applications, but maybe also creating additional interfaces when standard systems or applications are used to access non-standard systems.
MH: Do you have any recommendations where to get additional information?
MB: Yes. There is a nice book from Microsoft: “Developing International Software” by Nadine Kano (ISBN 1556158408). There is also “Programming for the world” by Sandra Martin (ISBN 0137221908). In addition Apple made his I18N guidelines available on the web for everybody.
MH: Thank you Marcel for this interview. Have fun and good luck with your new role.