Native Tongue as Default Language For an Application

Question

When downloading both Firefox and Chrome, I've noticed that the default version I got was in my native tongue of Hebrew. I personally don't like my applications in Hebrew, since I'm used to the English UI conventions embedded in me since long ago by:

1. The lack of choice: Most programs don't offer interfaces in multiple languages and when they do, those languages are usually English and the developer's native tongue.
2. Programming languages which are almost completely bound to the English language.

My question then is this:

1. If you translate your applications, would you limit the UI to the user's native tongue or give them the choice by enabling more than one language pack by default?
2. Which language would your application default to (which is interesting mostly if you only install one language pack with your application)?

And also generally I'd like to know how much value do you put into translating your applications on a whole.

Answer 1

I've never written an application for use by a large number of people, and never for anyone that didn't use English as their language, but if I did, I would probably take a route that installs all available language packs at install (unless the user did a custom install, where I would allow them to choose language packs) and then switch between languages as an option inside the program. If I had to only choose one language, I would choose English if I was doing all of the work, or the native language of the users if I had a translator.

Answer 2

I've helped develop an application that was used by Dutch, English, Spanish and Portuguese speaking users. Because the application installed from CD we just added all the language packs. Mostly because it saved us a lot of work not having to maintain 4 different versions.

If your application distributed from a website and you have to support more than only 4 languages I can imagine you don't want to let everyone download every language pack. But only distributing the native languages of people downloading the application seems a bit restrictive. Most people I know actually like their software in english. So at least adding the english language to all the versions makes sense.

Answer 3

When writing an application for multilingual use, I use Microsoft's Best Practices for Developing World-Ready Applications, which includes retrieving the current CultureInfo from the OS and using that as the default language pack.

Answer 4

I usually try to ship products with all available sets of localized resources. Upon a user's first launch of the product, the UI is presented in the localization most closely matching the OS on their machine. Once within the app, the user has the option of switching the UI to one of the other available localizations.

I think it is very important to provide localizations that match one's target markets. Most "normal" people (not software developers!) prefer by far to have a UI in their native language.