A empirical study on the status of software localization in open source projects

In modern software development, software localiza-tion is a key process to support distribution of soft-ware products to the global market. During software localization, developers typically convert all user-visible strings, resource files, and other culture-related ele-ments to the local versions that are well accepted by local users. Despite the popularity of software local-ization, there have been few studies on the its current status in software practice, such as the proportion of localized projects, the most popular locales, and more importantly, the quality of software localization. In this paper, we present an empirical study on the sta-tus of software localization in open source projects. We find from that, popularity of software localization varies a lot in different User Interface (UI) frameworks and domains. Furthermore, we surprisingly find that only about 60% of string keys are actually translated on av-erage in localized top software projects and software lo-calization often span a long period of time in the soft-ware development history.