Internationalization (i18n) Services
What is i18n?
Internationalization (i18n) is the necessary step of enabling software applications such that they can be easily and cost-effectively adapted (or localized) to various languages and regions, regardless of case specificity. While localization (L10n) focuses on content translation and cultural adaptation, internationalization (i18n) focuses on the code. Epik Global Solutions' internationalization services focus on both the technical and linguistic aspects of your project, ensuring that your web or desktop applications are not only accurate and culturally appropriate but also localization-ready, thus avoiding cost and delays during localization.
I18N Assessment
Our Internationalization Assessment is a detailed and thorough analysis of your software and content development processes. This service gauges your firm's localization-readiness by reviewing your globalization business goals, architecture, modules, templates, coding practices, third party tools, and so forth. From our findings, we generate a final assessment report detailing each potential internationalization issue along with our recommended solution. This helps organizations make strategic decisions that are technical as well as managerial such as how to divide the work in a hybrid team scenario.
The I18N Assessment Report includes architectural, design, and code level details, and targets a specific audience of technical managers and engineers.
I18N Estimation & Roadmap
The Internationalization Roadmap service creates a roadmap and budget with milestones to get your application internationalized and ready for localization. We begin with a few discovery meetings that include a product demo, architectural review, and requirement gathering with the product managers. Next, we perform code analysis for statistics on type of issues. The cost estimation considers each i18n issue and its recommended refactoring solution, as well as the frequency of these issues in conjunction with your strategic business milestones, release plans, resources, and budget and outlines an implementation plan for the recommended changes.
The I18N Estimation & Roadmap Report includes a budget, resourcing plan, milestones and schedule, and targets an audience of business and product managers.
I18N Implementation
I18n Implementation is a turnkey service to complete the i18n enabling of legacy code. We assign each project with a team consisting of an i18n architect, senior i18n software engineers, and a program manager to complete the refactoring work. This includes resolving issues with hardcoded strings, concatenations, locale based formatting (dates, time, calendar, number, currency, addresses, phone numbers, and other adaptations necessary to support the conventions of the target locales. Our approach is holistic and includes adaptations to design, architecture, and business logic as jointly agreed and approved by our customers.
Customers like working with us as we work within your Dev Op processes. Our work can be delivered as PRs that get checked by your dev team before our code is committed. We include pseudo-localization and unit testing as part of the implementation. Program Management also provides weekly status updates and raises important topics for customer input and decisions where necessary.
Using EGS' i18n Implementation service expands your dev team with additional resources and i18n expertise. Our hybrid team approach gives you control, while freeing your developers to focus on new feature development instead of refactoring old code. We recommend combining the i18n Implementation with a Guidelines based custom training, so that dev teams will be self sufficient to maintain the i18n code without creating new issues.
I18N Training and Guidelines
I18N Training is a perfect way to begin your Internationalization effort. This training is aimed at outlining common and less common issues, and what it takes to solve them. The training is used to get your organization and teams get on the same page with a common understanding.
I18N Guidelines is a service where EGS team will review your code and architecture and create tested and customized refactoring solutions specific to your programming languages, architecture, and coding styles. A custom i18n Training session based on the prepared Guidelines enables customer dev teams complete their i18n refactoring using tested and proven solutions.
I18N Testing & Fixing
Have you finished your own i18n refactoring and wonder if you missed anything? Missing i18n coding issues cost more to fix if identified during or after L10n and risk delays with your launch date.
EGS can review and confirm your software's localization readiness via pseudo-localization testing and source code analysis to identify any remaining i18n issues before localization begins.
We can also refactor and fix the issue if you so choose.
Our Team
Our i18n team consists of an i18n team lead, senior i18n software developers, architects, testers, program managers, trainers, and subject matter experts. Where necessary we will also have DBA's assigned to ensure the backend databases are also internalized properly.
EGS team members have many years of hands-on experience delivering i18n services to satisfied customers.
Our Approach
We believe in a collaborative approach to software i18n. We work closely with our clients product managers and dev managers to understand their business needs, and product architecture. Once we plan the work ahead we agree on solutions together and whether you want us to do it all or you want to divide the work between your devs and ours. This way our customers are always in control of their source code. Our goal is to make our customers successful and able to maintain the internationalized code base on their own.