🚀 go-pugleaf

I am in the midst of negotiating a contract with a U.S. government agency
to produce a qualitative analysis system.  This system will be generic
enough that the agency can recover their expenses by licensing the system
to other users.

I would like to suggest to the agency that they consider the
international market.

Thus, I have several questions for INSOFT-L subscribers:

1. Should internationalization be built in to any new system without even
   considering internationalization as a special feature in the design
   specifications?  In other words, in a system that only needs a message
   catalog for internationalization, isn't the message catalog and the
   lines of code that reference it just another way of coding strings?

2. Related to question #1, should I mention the internationalization to
   the government agency before the project begins (and possibly start
   a needless, drawn out discussion) or wait until after it's completed?
   Maybe another way to phrase this question is . . . should the cost of
   internationalization be built in (i.e. hidden) in the overall cost of
   the system or explicitly stated as a separate expense?

3. What portion of the expenses for a programming project is
   internationalization?


Thanks for your answers; I will consolidate them, then send one message
to INSOFT-L.

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
*========================================================================*