Just finished listening to the Scott Hanselman Podcast with Michael Kaplan.
It seems the four good languages to test your application for Internationalisation problems are as follows:
| Language | Test |
| Turkish | The Turkish “i” problem. (Turkish language has four i’s) |
| German | 30% -> 40% longer than the equivalent English words. |
| Arabic | Right-to-left language |
| Thai | Good test of how your application handles Uniscribe formatting. Particularly word-breaking. |
Another interesting test from Scott:
When I was doing internationalization, we were working in banking, we thought about the German example and we thought about more complicated examples. One of the things with one of the bugs that we wanted to catch was pushing UTF-8 code all the way through the system and back and making sure that as it move from web server to middle tier, from middle tier to database and back, that we didn’t screw something up. We didn’t go turning into block squares, testing the system all the way through to make sure that something wasn’t lost.
The Hanselminutes podcast is on my weekly listening list.