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we are going to localize the user interface of a WinForms application system, partly written in C#, partly in C++/CLI. The system consists of about 350K LOC. The user interface is about one third of the code. There are about 50 forms in the main application, and some satellite applications with some additional dialogs. Currently, the whole GUI is german, and we are planning to give the application an alternate english GUI.

What I am looking for is some metrics or techniques for making a rough guess about the effort we are going to expect. Any hints appreciated!

Doc Brown
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2 Answers2

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Forms are never a problem, you can send them off to a localization service and they'll translate it for you for very little money. There might be some iterations to get the details right, heavily dependent on how 'technical' the UI is.

The hard ones are places in your code where you've hard-coded a string literal. Or implicitly counted on number formatting to be predictable with a comma for a decimal point for example. Only you can fix that and only you can estimate the amount of work it will take.

Hans Passant
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There is no way to guess the effort from what you have written.

If you want quite good Localization metric, count translatable words. Translation vendor usually charges based on that metric.

If you want Internationalization metric, I am afraid that there is no way to even roughly guess. There are too many factors to consider. Since this is desktop application, these would be the questions:

  • Are translatable strings externalized (placed in resource files, all of them)?
  • Do you use layout managers (like TableLayoutPanel)?
  • What about formatting? Are all numbers, dates, amounts, possibly units & calendars as well, formatted according to user preferences?
  • What language you are planning to localize to (besides English)? Do you plan to support Simplified Chinese (meaning mandatory GB18030 charset support)?
  • What would be default (fallback, neutral) language? I am assuming that currently it is German. Do you plan to change it to English?
  • Do you have any localizable images?
  • Et cetera, there is much more than that.
Paweł Dyda
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  • +1. Yes, I don't want the community to guess the effort for me, I am looking for hints how to make a better estimation on my own. – Doc Brown Nov 09 '10 at 06:35