Sean said:
A pitty
Thanks for you assistance on this.
Just our of curiosity how does microsoft come up with these langauges during
beta stages? if you take a look at
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html for the most widely spoken
langauges in the world the top 4 are Chinese, English, Hindustani and
Spanish. German and Japanese are not in the top 10. Do the German and
Japanese developers provide better feed back to Microsoft or whats the story
here.
German and Japanese are pilot languages for Microsoft product
localization and have been for a very long time. You should read up on
common practices in software localization and internationalization.
Microsoft Press has published a couple of quite sturdy titles on the
subject, the first by Nadine Kano appeared around 1995.
German language reveals issues to do with high-ASCII characters, and
also space issues since UI strings translated into German take up about
50% more space than English strings (as a rule of thumb). So the
localized German build reveals several things which may have to be fixed
in the core product.
Japanese language builds reveal similar issues: East Asian character
sets and vertical writing being a couple of cases in point.
In addition, the German and Japanese *markets* are extremely important.
There are smaller pilots for other prototypical language scripts, but
the relative market-sizes for these usually dictate smaller or later betas.
