Lost in Translations: Bringing the World to Shopify - Shopify

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This post details the technical challenges and solutions for internationalizing Shopify's platform, focusing on language-specific grammatical constructs like gender and pluralization. It describes the development of custom cops and linters to detect and correct hardcoded English strings, the automation of content extraction into dictionaries, the use of pseudolocalization with vowel doubling to mimic longer words and aid visual testing, the migration to UTF8 to support a wider range of characters in MySQL and Rails, and the creation of an internal "Translation Platform" that leverages GitHub and translation management system APIs to automate the translation request and commit process. It also outlines future challenges in internationalizing UX elements, maps, geography, number formatting, addresses, and phone numbers.