Willkommen! Bienvenue! ¡Bienvenido!
Confused already? And I haven't yet spoken in my mother tongue: Vítejte!
If you are a linguist, you might have identified German, French and Spanish. And last but not least my native language, often considered the most difficult one: Czech. Now I can anticipate a question like: "How does it happen that this guy speaks so many languages?" The answer is simple: I personally don't but members of my team do. It is our everyday job. We are a localization team based in Prague, Czech Republic, and our main responsibility is QA of the Sun Java(tm) Enterprise System on German, French and Spanish locales.
So why would we want to start to blog? Our job is rewarding yet sometimes frustrating. Have you ever tried to explain to a native English speaking engineer that his beloved application crashes on French locale because it doesn't handle apostrophes correctly? Or have you submitted a bug together with Spanish log files only to find out that the evaluating engineer doesn't speak the language and can't read the logs? Well, you should definitely try and get your lesson on cultural difference. But just in case you don't have the opportunity you might want to read our posts. We have already experienced all these issues for you and we want to write about them.
Our work is more like a mission. We believe that just like we all share one world, we should have an equal chance to share the software. And though millions of users share one web at these days, there are too many who do not speak English. And that's what the localization is about: breaking the language barriers. It's exciting and it's fun. Join us and stay tuned!
