- This slide deck was created for an external SF Globalization meetup, going over the technical challenges and innovation that SFDC s G11n team has

Transcription

1 - This slide deck was created for an external SF Globalization meetup, going over the technical challenges and innovation that SFDC s G11n team has achieved - The intention was the keep the slides light on text (as much as possible) and place more responsibility on the speaker 1

2 Any purchase decisions customer make should be made based on currently available technology. 2

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4 - Ask the audience How many of you know what we do? Adjust speed and depth of the overview based on their response - Salesforce started as an enterprise cloud computing company; enterprise software => software that helps organizations and businesses run their day-to-day activities - Salesforce is very much a software company; we handle the worry of managing business software for our clients 4

5 - When Salesforce started, the provided software to help a company s sales force; it allowed sales reps to manage account and contacts - Provided a set of standard entities, like Accounts, Contacts, Leads, and Pricebooks to support the sales force users 5

6 - As the company matured, the next big offering was software for service and support - Salesforce provides the software that powers Comcast s call centers and Dell s knowledge base; if you ve ever owned a Dell computer and wanted to see how to upgrade the computer s memory, you ve used our knowledge base software 6

7 - In 2009, Salesforce embraced the social revolution and created Salesforce Chatter to help organization s collaborate - Chatter takes a Facebook-like approach to collaborating, allowing users to post ideas and share documents - They can also create groups to work on common problems and discuss in real-time using the built-in instant messenger 7

8 - With a great existing architecture and infrastructure, Salesforce also offers a Platform-As-a-Service - We want to be the de facto choice to for you to build the next Facebook, Groupon, or StackExchange on - Our platform takes care of backup, failover, security, and scalability - Force.com allows you to make use of the data and structure that s built by Salesforce; Heroku allows you leverage multiple languages 8

9 - Our entire application should be usuable for our multi-national and international customers as it is for our local mom and pop shop - Support 74 languages, 184 locales, 200 currencies - This is where me and my team come in 9

10 - So how does salesforce address these i18n issues? - Like most other software companies that need to handle translations, we store every string that we display on our pages in a separate file. - At Salesforce, we chose to use XML files, and I ll go into the rationale for that later - The localization team handles the translation of these XML label files, sourcing out to our vendors, managing the translation memory and all sorts of other magic - The globalization team, which I m on, handles all the code to provide the tools and features for our I18n solutions. 10

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12 - One of the first challenges for the G11N team was to support renaming of our standard entities - This had some issues in english, for the need to handle a vs an, as well as - LIGHTEN IMAGE if necessary for better projector support 12

13 - One of the first challenges for the G11N team was to support renaming of our standard entities - This had some issues in english, for the need to handle a vs an, and some languages don t even have indefinite articles - How do you define singular and plural forms? What about languages without plural forms? - What about languages where the word differs by cases - And then there s Greek (plosive ending for certain words) and Bulgarian (definiteness is on the first word in the phrase) 13

14 - 16 Standard, 15 End-user, 43 Platform 74 Languages - To address all these issues, and provide support for adding additional languages, SFDC built a grammar engine - The grammar of a language was encapsulated into Language Declension - A declension define all the noun and modifier (adj and article) forms of a language 14

15 - XML example of how we define nouns - Advantage of XML is that we can also specify a DTD (Document Type Definition) which explains what makes up valid XML - The top is an example of what a developer would provide; the English default - The translator knows the different forms of the language, would provide all the necessary forms - We also provide support for compound nouns, like Contact Name 15

16 - XML example of how we define nouns - Advantage of XML is that we can also specify a DTD (Document Type Definition) which explains what makes up valid XML - The top is an example of what a developer would provide; the English default - The translator knows the different forms of the language, would provide all the necessary forms - We also provide support for compound nouns, like Contact Name 16

17 - Example of the type of labels you can write - The use of tags allows user to rename nouns and, as long as all necessary forms are specified, still have correct translations appear - The tags are also case-sensitive, so lowercase new contact can be produced as well - The {0} is part of Java s MessageFormat notation, which we use to substitute in variables - The use of noun tags allows the user to customize the translation as needed and still be able to produce grammatically correct labels - Also go into the complexity of adjectives affecting nouns - Have other examples ready to go 17

18 - This is the UI we provides to our users for customizing their entities - The fields that appear change based on language 18

19 - The fields that appear change based on language 19

20 - For our standard entities, we provide an additional UI for translating the various fields and compound nouns associated with each entity 20

21 - so our customers can add Swahili or Punjabi 21

22 - Example of how to support translations for custom fields 22

23 - Translation workbench 23

24 - Allow packaging of custom objects and custom fields 24

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26 - Create custom labels so that partners can define and translate strings, just like we do 26

27 - Takes 8-10MBs per language, with MBs per grammar. Loading all into memory -> 500 MB - Leveraging SleepyCat reduces heap space to 90MB - Renamed nouns are stored in a map, loaded per org login and flushed on rename tab change 27

28 - In 2009, Salesforce added support for Hebrew and Arabic, our first Right-to-Left Languages - Adding the HTML attribute dir=rtl got us a lot of the way there, but it didn t handle all the custom CSS and JavaScript formatting we had - We modified our existing CSS parser to support the ${left} and ${right} tags that they left becomes right if a user s language is RTL - Because we rely on the browser, we also have to deal with browser bugs (no RTL support for popups in firefox) 28

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30 - Support ~200 currencies - Corporate currency is used for comparing values of two different currencies 30

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33 - One issue we dealt with early on was that developers would had hardcoded strings as they were building their UI and would forget to localize their pages - Even if pages were correctly localized, teams had a hard time testing before a label drop because newly added labels weren t translated - We added a fake language that teams can switch to to make sure their page didn t contain hardcoded strings - The labels are generated using a script (XSLT Extensible Stylesheet Language) that parses through all our existing label files and wraps the strings with additional UTF-8 chars - Also allows for testing of label expansion due to translation, as is common with German

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