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Why things like Multi-Lang. support are not important?

1 points by user90131313 ↗ HN
Web is mostly in English , I get it. But why so many websites/services or apps only launch in English, regardless of their budget? I know project with billions worth aand their website not even support other languages. They have a page to change language and it's broken for months. They have at least 200 FT workers and they're global company too. I don't get it. Can anyone explain it what am I missing?

3 comments

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curious_curios
Refactoring for i18n after the fact in a large codebase is surprisingly difficult. Many of these places have done some research and made the call they would profit more from continued feature work.
user90131313
I actually meant Front end multi-languages support. Like when you go to fb.com or google.com. Simple to do it via todays tools? or is it that hard?
curious_curios
If you hadn’t built it out to start it’s pretty hard. There are a lot of nuances in how you format strings by language so you can’t just translate every string you find. Also keep in mind some strings shown to end users come from calls to the backend, so you’ll need a localization story there.

This also means that you need to add a localization gate to all feature releases, slowing down velocity.