Localization-surfing InstallShield

I like the way in which InstallShield does what it does. It's too bad they won't give me my own copy of the software, though.

It took me several iterations, but I've successfully navigated the areas in the InstallShield UI that do and do not support wide characters. (I thought there was a time when I could put anything anywhere and have it display properly, but suddenly I was getting corrupted characters in some screens in Asian installers. So much for the ailing memory of the noble localization project manager...)

TITLE_MAIN=Glopware v3.0.1 Ko main (ASCII only)

TITLE_CAPTIONBAR=Glopware v3.0.1 설정 caption

COMPANY_NAME=GlopWeb Inc.

PRODUCT_NAME=Glopware v3.0.1 Ko prodname

PRODUCT_KEY=Glopstart.exe (ASCII only)

PRODUCT_VERSION=3.0.1.12

FOLDER_NAME=Glopware v3.0.1 한국어 folder

PRODUCT_DIR=GlopWeb 3.0.1 Ko proddir (ASCII only)

Your mileage may certainly vary, but I found that, anytime we used double-byte characters in the strings labeled "(ASCII only)", they became corrupted. My hunch is that there's some other variable or setting required to support such characters in those places, but I figured I could give the release engineers only so much grief before I suffered backlash.

If you're a double-byte InstallShield expert, by all means reply with the better localization way.

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.