Thursday, April 20, 2006

Vault and DreamWeaver

Many developers believe that localization is merely a matter of language translation.  I prefer to think of localization more generally as the process of making a product appropriate for the expectations of a given culture.  Language is only one aspect of this process.  In most cases, there are other issues to consider.  For example:

• If you want to make your sports-related software appropriate for Argentina, you have to do more than just translate all the strings into their variant of Spanish.  You can probably remove the features for "American football", and you have to add support for rugby.
• If you want your cell phone software to be appropriate for France, you can't just translate everything into French.  If you've only been supporting CDMA, you also have to make sure it works on GSM.
• Likewise, when we decided we wanted to make our version control software appropriate for Dreamweaver users, we knew it wasn't enough to just talk more about CSS and less about C#.  We had to provide good integration into the Dreamweaver environment.

And that is what we did.  Vault 3.5 (which is scheduled to be released in June) will include a plugin which supports Dreamweaver integration.  This is our first effort at localizing Vault for a foreign culture.  It is both exciting and scary to reach out to a group of people who are so different from us.

Standing at the threshold of this new experience, I find myself thinking it might have been easier if we had selected a culture more similar to our own.  A few weeks ago I saw a National Geographic TV special about Dreamweaver users.  What an eye-opener that was!  Some of the language and customs of the people in the (former) Republic of Macromedia can seem really bizarre to a Visual Studio guy like me.

Anyway, we do enjoy a challenge.  I am looking forward to the things I may learn from this new cross-cultural experience.

If you are interested in using Vault with Dreamweaver, the feature exists as a preview in the current release of Vault, version 3.1.8.  A support forum for this plugin is also available.

:-)