Re: Release a spanish version of Delphi
- From: "Jeremy McGee [BassettData]" <jeremy.mcgee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2006 21:42:56 +0100
As others have mentioned, this list is clearly nonsensical, as it doesn't
include Chinese.
It is probably right however for DevCo to examine the idea of localizing
Delphi and the other development tools into languages other than English,
German, French and Japanese. The factors that should be considered, however,
aren't as simple as population or GDP.
Rather, as with all product management decisions of this kind, the costs of
such a move need to be weighed against the potential revenue.
For the Spanish translation, on the costs side there is the localization
work itself, which is non-trivial if the documentation is translated. Also
important is the cost of support staff that speak Spanish, as the product
will then be used by Spanish-speakers who don't have English even as a
secondary language. Then there are subtleties like adding the Spanish
translation to the QA process, ensuring the product works correctly on the
different variants of Spanish Windows, ensuring that e.g. collation
sequences are correct and so on.
The extra revenue has to be measured in terms of those copies of Delphi that
wouldn't otherwise have been sold. Development environments generally sell
to educated people in full-time employment or education, and who are
therefore much more likely in most (non-native English) cultures to at least
understand two or more languages, of which one is likely to be English.
So, in a given territory, if most of the potential Delphi developers speak
English anyway there's no point in a full translation. This would explain
why we don't see a Hindi version, for example, or a Finnish version, as most
developers in those territories speak English pretty well.
On the other hand, if there's a large potential market that isn't being
reached because a particular language version isn't available, then a
product manager at DevCo should estimate that market size and make the
potential investors aware of it so an investment can be made.
My personal view is that someone at DevCo should do this for the following
languages:
- Spanish (made a little muddier by the distinctions between Castillian and
Latin American)
- Russian (not just for Russia, but an important second language in the
former Eastern bloc)
and once the work for Unicode-enabling the VCL is done
- Chinese (traditionally done with a partner, who might be able to do the
VCL Unicode work)
- Arabic (a bit of a stretch this one but likely to become more important in
the next five to ten years)
It may be, however, that the return just isn't there, and the money required
would be better spent on (say) hiring another few documentation authors or
creating a Turbo version that sells at $100. All of which kind of sums up
Nick's job, I think!
-- J
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