Lost in Translations: Bringing the World to Shopify - Shopify

This post details the initial efforts in internationalizing Shopify's platform. It covers the challenges of handling gendered languages, pluralization rules, and hardcoded strings, and the solutions implemented: building cops and linters to detect violations, automating content extraction into dictionaries, using pseudolocalization to mimic longer words and distinguish translated content, and addressing MySQL's limited UTF8 support. It also describes the development of an internal 'Translation Platform' to automate the process of requesting and integrating translations via GitHub and translation management system APIs.