Facebook is localized into more than 70 languages, including upside down English which I tried and regretted immediately!  But, they missed something: a indomitable, untranslated string, below my username. Unlike the other UI texts, “edit profile” is not Portuguese. I know because I am Portuguese. And slightly OCD about these things. I found a localization bug on Facebook! 

Let me start by saying that I’m in awe of the work Facebook has done in terms of I18n and L10n (that’s internationalization and localization for you newbies our there). They were to 1st to try crowd-translations at scale, the product is available is hundreds of languages, and the Facebook language team is on the forefront of designing seamless multilingual experiences. Go Facebook Language team! But, localization is (still) hard. Even Facebook hasn’t figured it all out.

If you’re in tech, building web and mobile applications and products the word “bug” is really meaningful to you. On a software product, a bug is a glitch in the software that causes it to behave in an unexpected way. The worst bug will kill your product, show your users a 404 page (even if it looks as good as slack’s 404 page, that’s not a page you want high traffic in), the smallest bug will go undetected by 99,999% of people. But the meaning is more profound: “bug” means headaches, time wasted, endless hours searching for what is causing it, hair-pulling frustration! Alright, I might be exaggerating a little, it’s usually not that bad.

Now, add the word “localization” to it. If you’ve built a web or mobile product and you localized it into different languages, targeting more users in international markets, it’s possible you’ll find yourself dealing with a “localization bug“.  This species of bug happens when your product in the translated language does not perform or look as expected. The most common cases are: a string that is not translated, or a translation that does not fit the UI and breaks the design of the app.

And you know what, we get them too!

We had a pretty hilarious one a couple days ago when Optimizely did not play nice with our localized website. Here’s what the homepage looked like to our Spanish speaking visitors. Not that consistent, right? Lo siento! (I’m sorry!)