How to design in every language at once

As a developer I never had much problems building systems in multiple locales. I think on the web this was solved over 15 years ago when UTF-8 became mainstream. Over 10 years ago I built a webapp with over 20 locales without much trouble. This included ltr and rtl.<p>I think the biggest problem with any application is that designers always use text and images that fit in their design. But this is not the reality. I think developers can improve themselves if they understand this. And also: developers can improve themselves when they don&#x27;t build pixel perfect according to the design but know how to make it look good when texts don&#x27;t fit the design.<p>If both the designers and developers know about building text-flexible applications they will have more value for the company they are working for. A design should be seen more as a style guide. The end product must be better than the design.

Aside from the technical details, the commitment to this idea is staggering and admirable.<p>&gt; Translations are done by human professionals, within two days for any language representing more than 0.03% of our active user base.<p>&gt; New features roll out only when enough of the translation has been done that it will cover 99.8% of our user base.

I often forget how much utility I derive from knowing English in an online world (replace &#x27;utility derived&#x27; with luck, privilege, blessings, etc to taste.) I am glad there are places making this effort. Localization is hard, and scaling is significantly harder. Hats off to Canva.

I&#x27;ve done a lot of i18n work in the past.<p>I found the hardest bit was managing the translation files, at least in Java. Java has a scheme where the you create files with key&#x2F;value pairs of text id to translation. Instead of putting in text in your element &quot;This is a button&quot;, you put in the text id &quot;THIS_IS_BUTTON&quot;, and java&#x27;s i18n would look for a properties file with a suffix of the current local and then pull the value for &quot;THIS_IS_BUTTON&quot;.<p>It was enormously cumbersome for large apps

The &quot;What did we do&quot; section sounds like a product all by itself.<p>But seriously, I found this really interesting. Beyond any feel-goodness around supporting non-English speakers, I&#x27;d love to know if Canva has an idea of how much revenue they&#x27;ve generated from what sounds like a pretty big investment.<p>I would guess that in many of the 103 languages Canva supports they&#x27;re the only game in town. That sounds like a good long-term strategy to me.

It&#x27;s crazy that there isn&#x27;t more support to simplify and standardize localization workflows in operating systems, SDKs, tools and file formats. IME a localization workflow today doesn&#x27;t look much different than in the 90&#x27;s, it&#x27;s still mostly built around your own custom tools (or in some cases, framework-specific tools like the ones provided by Qt). Thinking about it, a high quality, human(!) translation service (no machine learning bullshit) for apps would actually be a feature where Apple or Google could justify their 30% fee.

Interesting article. How do people usually name their keys in their i18n data files? For example, do you name based on the &#x27;what&#x27; or the &#x27;where&#x27;?<p>The what:<p>greeting: &quot;Hello&quot;<p>or the where:<p>dashboard.header: &quot;Hello&quot;<p>edit: I guess you could do both<p>dashboard.header:<p><pre><code> greeting: &quot;Hello&quot;</code></pre>

I wondered in college (in the 80&#x27;s!) why all computer languages were in English. Fast forward 40 years, and somebody is doing something about it. Kudos!