Guidelines for Multilingual Software Development

Abstract

For software products to be effectively usable by an international audience, they must be localized, or translated, to suite the target user group’s culture and language. Multilingual software development is a vast topic and it crosscuts all the phases of software development life cycle and it requires consideration of additional factors and activities such as new roles and linguistic translation of content to one or more languages. One of the main reasons why most developers ignore multilingual software development is a lack of awareness about the related activities, tools, technologies, practices and service providers, as well as the associated uncertainty of possible implications. This thesis project aims to raise awareness about and encourage multilingual software development. This is done by reviewing relevant literature and understanding industry practices, and then presenting a list of guidelines for multilingual software development in an organized manner and providing a means of accessing only the guidelines suitable to and useful for a given project. To be specific, guidelines for multilingual software development are provided for software projects that are under feasibility study, being implemented or in maintenance phase. The relevant guidelines can be retrieved using the Guidelines Navigation Tools (GNT) devised for different software lifecycle phases.