Pseudolocalization - Pseudolocalization in Microsoft Windows

Pseudolocalization in Microsoft Windows

Pseudolocalization was introduced at Microsoft during the Windows Vista development cycle. The type of pseudo-language invented for this purpose is called a pseudo locale in Windows parlance. These locales were designed to use character sets and scripts characteristics from one of the three broad classes of foreign languages used by Windows at the time—basic ("Western"), mirrored ("Near-Eastern"), and CJK ("Far-Eastern"). Prior to Vista, each of these three languages had their own separate builds of Windows, with potentially different code bases (and thus, different behaviors and bugs.) The pseudo locales created for each of these language families would produce text that still "reads" as English, but is made up of script from another languages. For example, the text string

Edit program settings

would be rendered in the "basic" pseudo-locale as

This process produces translated strings that are longer, include non-ASCII characters, and (in the case of the "mirrored" pseudo-locale), are written right-to-left.

Note that the brackets on either side of the text in this example help to spot the following issues:

• text that is cut off (truncation)

• strings that are formed by combining (concatenation)

• strings that are not made localizable (hard-coding)