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Isn't it "i18n"?

We put all the translations in a spreadsheet, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FoYdyEraEQuWofzbYCDP.... We didn't like the idea of storing in any more complex than a csv file.

All changes are shown to us in a diff before we merge, the csv is then downloaded and the i18n files created automatically after we merge the branch.

We've never had a single instance of abuse in over 10 years.



Internationalization (i18n). Localization (l10n). Globalization (g11n). Localizability (l12y).

Mozilla has a good article explaining the distinction: https://blog.mozilla.org/l10n/2011/12/14/i18n-vs-l10n-whats-...


Oh god, let's not start a10g words this way.

a10g means "abbreviating" by the w1y.

I promise it will not burn up too many more calories of soylent to just type it out, nor will it take much longer.



a11y looking like ally makes it the only one I don't roll my eyes at... but that only seems clever/memorable because of all of the preceeding awful uses of that abbreviation form.


H0a h0a h0a h0a h0a, I like that.


What gets me most is whether you have to count all the letters of the word, or just those left out.


J2t t3e l2t o1t

It’s infuriatingly annoying ;-)


Oh, it's supposed to be a lowercase “L”? I thought it was a vertical bar (“pipe”). Pipe ten nanoseconds? I wish HN used a more readable font.


Haha yeah I saw this earlier and that's exactly how I read it, I had no idea what it meant and I didn't click. Only now that I'm bored I went back to it- I would never have guessed the actual meaning


The ironic thing about this language is that it is an attempt to be "inclusive" by introducing weird shibboleths that exclude most people.

I was once informed by someone at a big tech that the reason for these "x[n]y" codes is because these words can be hard to spell for non-native speakers of English. Also, they added "a11y" (accessibility) to the list.

I think the real explanation was that these were introduced because "internationalization" is a long word and file path names used to be limited in the 1980s.


These abbreviations are among the stupidest trends in tech. We should learn from the Germans and embrace long words


Aka cute abbreviations that are impossible to remember or understand (c62d).


Like the actual meaning of PCMCIA cards:

People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms!


f4k this crap. Spell it out.


This covers strings, but what do you do about right-to-left languages, cultural differences in (say) information density, date pickers, color usage, UI preferences, emoji use, whatever? Did you make a conscious decision to only localize strings?


What do you mean with showing you the diff BEFORE you merge? Do you run a script comparing your current repository translation files with the ones on the google spreadsheet?




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