How to design in every language at once (opens in new tab)

As a developer I never had much problems building systems in multiple locales. I think on the web this was solved over 15 years ago when UTF-8 became mainstream. Over 10 years ago I built a webapp with over 20 locales without much trouble. This included ltr and rtl.

I think the biggest problem with any application is that designers always use text and images that fit in their design. But this is not the reality. I think developers can improve themselves if they understand this. And also: developers can improve themselves when they don't build pixel perfect according to the design but know how to make it look good when texts don't fit the design.

If both the designers and developers know about building text-flexible applications they will have more value for the company they are working for. A design should be seen more as a style guide. The end product must be better than the design.

Aside from the technical details, the commitment to this idea is staggering and admirable.

> Translations are done by human professionals, within two days for any language representing more than 0.03% of our active user base.

> New features roll out only when enough of the translation has been done that it will cover 99.8% of our user base.

I often forget how much utility I derive from knowing English in an online world (replace 'utility derived' with luck, privilege, blessings, etc to taste.) I am glad there are places making this effort. Localization is hard, and scaling is significantly harder. Hats off to Canva.

I've done a lot of i18n work in the past.

I found the hardest bit was managing the translation files, at least in Java. Java has a scheme where the you create files with key/value pairs of text id to translation. Instead of putting in text in your element "This is a button", you put in the text id "THIS_IS_BUTTON", and java's i18n would look for a properties file with a suffix of the current local and then pull the value for "THIS_IS_BUTTON".

It was enormously cumbersome for large apps

The "What did we do" section sounds like a product all by itself.

But seriously, I found this really interesting. Beyond any feel-goodness around supporting non-English speakers, I'd love to know if Canva has an idea of how much revenue they've generated from what sounds like a pretty big investment.

I would guess that in many of the 103 languages Canva supports they're the only game in town. That sounds like a good long-term strategy to me.

It's crazy that there isn't more support to simplify and standardize localization workflows in operating systems, SDKs, tools and file formats. IME a localization workflow today doesn't look much different than in the 90's, it's still mostly built around your own custom tools (or in some cases, framework-specific tools like the ones provided by Qt). Thinking about it, a high quality, human(!) translation service (no machine learning bullshit) for apps would actually be a feature where Apple or Google could justify their 30% fee.

Interesting article. How do people usually name their keys in their i18n data files? For example, do you name based on the 'what' or the 'where'?

The what:

greeting: "Hello"

or the where:

dashboard.header: "Hello"

edit: I guess you could do both

dashboard.header:

  greeting: "Hello"

I wondered in college (in the 80's!) why all computer languages were in English. Fast forward 40 years, and somebody is doing something about it. Kudos!