🚀 go-pugleaf

Here are the consolidated answers to the original questions from
Rene J. Valdes (Rene.J.Valdes@cdc.com):

     The obvious assumption appears to be that all software is created in
     English (hopefully in an internationalized reference version) and then
     localized into other languages.  Isn't really anybody localizing into
     English?  Isn't anybody developing software where the original
     (reference) version is in German, French, Japanese, etc. and the
     product is then localized for English?

Jeff
INSOFT-L List Manager

*========================================================================*
 Jeff Bowyer                         EMail:
 Computing Center		     jbowyer@cis.vutbr.cz
 Technical University of Brno
 Udolni 19, 602 00 BRNO
 Czech Republic
*========================================================================*


Sender: John W{tte (d88-jwa@nada.kth.se)

I am - sort of. I am a native Swedish speaker who write software
for the european market. However, since we need to localize to
several languages (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Italian, ...) I
write the software in English, and ship it to my publisher in Swedish
(I do that localization myself) with the English language file on
the side.

One interesting aspect is that you can really take any language version
and have it do the right thing for dates, times, text you write etc
since I write for the Macintosh, which has the best localization
support I've ever seen in the OS. We also ship languages in a separate
file from the main application; thanx to the Mac's resource manager
it doesn't create any strange problems for us!

On the thread of foreign users using English-language versions of
software: it's doable, as long as things like date and time still work
the way the "foreigner" is used to; I can read menu commands in English
well enough, but my documents look funny if they print dates as MM/DD/YYYY
instead of YY-MM-DD.


Sender: Reinhold Zandijk (reinoud@dialis.hacktic.nl)

Well, although not a professional software-engineer yet, I usually write my
program's in Dutch, and later localise it to English, but v.v. also occurs.
These languages can then be switched manually, or automatically. If it isn't a
big program, then I'll not even take the effort to translate it into multiple
languages; then only English is sufficient. If they want it in f.e. German,