Internationalization and the smart installer

Have we been thankful enough for InstallShield? I think it's a royal headache for the release engineers that have to get used to it, but it's a dream for a localization project manager:

• InstallShield does most of the hard work. Most of the strings are already translated into more languages than most companies know what to do with.
• Customized strings live in a single, text-based value.shl file, which the release engineers peel off and hand me for translation.
• By default it creates language-specific branches in source control, which prevents, say, your Russian release from getting pasted in as a mere revision to your original English release.
  

The value.shl file is very simple, and ours changes so infrequently that it's easiest for me to update it myself (version numbers, copyright dates, URLs), without need to hand it off for translation.

Of course, it did drive the release engineers batty in the early days, especially when I wandered in asking for 3 Asian and 2 Western installers every few months. The hard part for them is seeing far enough down the road to build a maintainable structure in source control. It never occurred to them to start out with branches labeled /en/ or /0009-English/ because they never foresaw the need for other languages, so they painted themselves into corners but didn't realize it until Chinese came along one day.

People in this industry write about introducing worldwide consciousness to the overall mindset of the organization, and evangelizing the gospel of localization; that's the 50,000 foot-/16,129 meter-level. Must be nice. I spend most of my time crawling in a trench in source control somewhere, trying to soften periods into decimal separators without getting flamed.