Localization of the EH&S Application

Project Description

Enviance, Inc., an industry-leading Environmental, Health, and Safety (EH&S) software provider, needed to localize its EH&S application to support various languages, including Chinese, in order to meet the demands of its growing customer base.

Since the original application only supported English, the Softengi team faced the difficult task of developing a scalable localization solution that would enable the application to support the company’s present and future language preferences.

Challenges

The Softengi team faced the following challenges:

• A large amount of work to be done due to the large size of the application;
• A need for some refactoring of the core of the application;
• The time-consuming process of file localization;
• Extensive use of number, date, time, and currency formats in the application and its dependency on the user culture;
• Extensive language and UI/UX testing of the localized application, etc.

Softengi Team Tech Contribution

Due to the size of the application, the code was divided into smaller parts, then distributed among the members of the development team.

Once assigned, our development team performed a thorough application analysis to evaluate the need for any core redesign or modifications. Based on the results of our analysis, our developers wrote code for the missing parts of the system core, provided macros support, and created database tables and scripts that enabled us to export data to and from Excel, etc.

The team found about 200,000 literals in the code, many of which were the system ones or duplicates of other literals. As such, the main task was to examine each literal, identify users’ literals, subdivide them into categories, and allow them to access their respective resources. The team’s solution was to develop a script detecting lines in the code and introduce a system for resource organization.

Due to the use of .NET, the identified literals were categorized by their levels (global, module, and local) and type. This successful solution helped the team save much time and effort.

The task of localizing the client files was performed following a unique approach: they were localized in JavaScript on the server side. Owing to this approach, the same resources were used both for server files and client files, thus saving much time.

To format numbers, date and time, and currency in accordance with the user culture, the embedded features of .NET were applied. The problem of embedded application messages was solved by code refactoring and localizing the templates.

Ultimately, qualified Softengi testing engineers performed the technical part of the localization testing, which was followed by the involvement of Chinese native speakers who checked whether the translated text met the cultural specifics of their language and was right for the nature of the application itself.

Conclusion

Over our nine-month engagement with Enviance, the Softengi team leveraged numerous technologies to develop a customized solution that enabled the application to fully localize into Chinese.