Question

I’m writing a framework for web projects. (In Asp.NET MVC but that is not relevant).

Now I want to save my resource strings in the database, not in a resource file.
I’m doing this because its easy to edit through a web interface, no need to upload my whole project.

Now I think about how deep I should go. Should i have only one language “English” and use it for the United States and Great Britain? Or should I have different resourcestrings for different cultures? (Off course in most cases the text is the same in both languages).

Does anyone know how Microsoft, Google or Facebook handle this ?

Answer 1

If you are writing a framework I would implement it that it can be done, but that “American English” falls back to English if there is no seperate translation for “American English”. In German (my mother tongue) there are seperate locales for German – Germany, German – Austria or German – Switzerland, but they are hardly used.

E.g. we had a software which used an (for us) obscure word for “to chat” which nobody in our office new. Later found out that this word is used in northern Germany (and we are in Austria, located south of Germany). For all the German speaking guys out there: the word was “Schnacken”.