Editor's review
Lingobit Localizer is a powerful software localization tool for Visual C /MFC, Delphi, .NET and Java applications. State of the art automatic tools for QA, translation reuse and project management guarantee high productivity and outstanding quality.
Pros: The localizer application provides good tools for translating a program into multiple languages. The package provides tools to extract resources to be translated, coordinate activities between translators and developers and management of the project. Dialogs, forms and menus can be corrected directly in a visual editor provided for the purpose.
As the extraction of strings to be translated is automatic, one could avoid the need to understand any technicalities/internals of the application to be translated or source code to be looked at.
Cons: One of the biggest problems with localization is with the user interfaces, translated strings causing problems in the interaction screens because of altered length of the translated strings. This application provides tools for doing it manually by thoughtfully providing a nice layout edit tool. That works, as long as number of screens to be handled is limited. But in any major application the number of screens to be altered grows combinatorially to huge numbers very soon. Single user manual interactions tools will be completely inadequate. What is needed is the ability to detect these problems automatically, quite often by comparing bit image of the original and the translated screen.
That leads to the second problem that of running regression tests automatically and catching these problems. So, not only you need to test automatically, but one needs scripting support with this test tool to be able to program and set up screen captures, compare functionality etc.
A third issue that has not been addressed is if a multi byte language is the target language, such as simple/ traditional Chinese or Japanese, Korean etc. Unless it has been planned originally, this issue cannot be tackled as an afterthought.
Overall quite a nice and easy to use program. Quite valuable too as it makes collaboration between translators and developers quite easy. But as discussed above there could be problems with localization of large packages. This application is clearly suitable for comparatively simpler programs. But for that niche this a useful package and delivers required tools. The application is definitely a 4 star performer.
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