Some notes on Web Site Localization

Joe Brenner, Localization Engineer, Simultrans

• Quick over view of the world wide web and HTML, including a comparision to other hypertext systems such as Windows Help files.

• Two approaches: tools to extract strings, or direct editing of HTML.

• HTML is getting more complicated, e.g. tables and so on. String extraction can be problematic in some cases.

• The usual problem, distinguising between text and code, still applies.

• Much like help files, bitmaps have to be handled separately, there are as yet no analogs of SHED.

• Interactive websites require some sort of code in the background (perl, or Javascript), which implies some code localization.

• The use of iso-8859 ampersand codes to get around codepage differences.

• Approaches to multi-lingual web-sites. Bitmaps (e.g. Verity) vs. pull down menus.