Archived copy of A Swedish wolf in Norway

Through the comments of an article at IDG.se, I found a
blog written by Microsoft employee Jesper Holmberg, where he writes about his work as a localization engineer, translating and adapting Microsoft product for the Swedish market. Since I am the guy doing the Swedish translation of Opera, I found his blog very interesting, especially the posts about the possible pit falls of translating and depending on automated tools.

I have been working on translation support in Opera since back in the 4.0 days. I started working at Opera Software on 5th January 2000, and my first job was to rewrite the preferences back-end from something that relied on Windows API calls to something slightly more cross-platform, since Opera 4 was the version that was going to be ported to more platforms. After having the new framework in place, I was given the task of improving the situation in regard to translations.

In earlier versions, we had translated the Windows resources file and recompiled the binary (EXE) for each translated version, but this was too much work, we needed a simpler way of doing it, and one that could possibly be cross-platform. I came up with the stand-alone "LNG" files (LNG is of course short for "language"), with a file format very similar to the INI file format used to store preferences, based on a similar idea for a small freeware MS-DOS program I had written several years earlier (but I'm obviously not the first one who have had this idea). The similarity was of course intentional, because then I was able to re-use the code from the preferences back-end to also load the translation file. The English master file was then extracted from the source code using some intricated scripting that originally was used for the 3.6 translations but was heavily hacked for 4.0, and handed over to the translators. To test-run it, I translated Opera to Swedish myself. I have written a bit about what happened in my trial runs in my personal blog.

The situation has since been improved, with more proper tools being invented and the need for the horrible scripting alleviated, also making the translation system more platform-independent (the LNG files for Opera 4 was still Windows-only). We now use a standard file format towards our translators, so that they can use readily-available tools to aid their work.

I am proud to work with making it possible to provide Opera in as many languages as possible. In the beginning it was also great fun knowing that I was able to have a full Swedish translation ready long before the Norwegian release was out, being the only Swede working for Opera at the time. I still try to keep the Swedish translation up-to-date at all times, even for internal-only releases, not only to catch translation problems before they occur (preferrably), but also because do much prefer to have software that speaks my own language.