Parlez-vous japonais?. 
Today, as soon as you upload your software to MacUpdate or VersionTracker, people will find it and start downloading it.
Those downloads will go on 24/7 because people, not only from the US but from around the world are downloading it. When it is midnight for the Californian, it is already 9am for Parisiens and only 4pm for Tokyoites.
But this will only happen, if you design your software international.
If Frédéric in Paris and 一郎（Ichiro) in Tokyo realize that your software can’t display their name correctly, things would be a little bit different.
Imagine having your name displayed in ASCII code on your birthday card.
That’s why internationalization is very important.
You can be successful focusing on the US market only. But if you internationalize your software, you can extend your reach and can enjoy even greater success. Plus, your self esteem would be much higher.
Let’s ask what someone with that expertise has to say.
James Thomson of TLA Systems Ltd., the author of the DragThing, is perhaps, one of the best known shareware author in the Mac community. He started internationalization of his product very early on and has become one of the world’s best known shareware authors.
He has just recently shared some interesting numbers on his web site.
(The article doesn’t have permalink, so if you don’t see the statistics at the following URL, look for article written on May 23, 2007).
According to the article, 46% of the sales comes from the US. So the US is the single most dominant market for the Mac software. Add 4% from the UK and 1.7% from Australia and portion of 3.52% from Canada, you will have almost 55% coverage with English language alone. So if you support English, you will be in a good shape.
[ Those of you reading this article from non-English speaking countries should definitely consider adding English menus and buttons to your products.]
But this doesn’t mean English is enough.
It means English-only software may be able to double their sales by internationalization.
James certainly sees that benefits. He said “generally, I think Japanese people are more honest than other countries.” He said at its peak the registration from Japan has accounted almost around 30% of sales fro DragThing.
The latest statistics from the last 12 months shows only 12.28% sales from Japan, but James think it is because so many people in Japan has already purchased DragThing five years ago. He said among those people who have used DragThing in the past three months, 24.6% has chosen Japanese as their primary language.
He suggest “It’s worth it to do Japanese, German and French.”
And as a Mac journalist seeing so many software since the ’80s, I can assure if your software support Japanese, it is ready to support almost every languages; although it might still have some problem with languages with Arabic characters; (FYI. I happen to speak/read a little bit of Farsi which uses Arabic characters).
Internationalization happens at many different levels.
It can start with correctly displaying the international characters as well as comfortably entering international characters and precisely searching international string.
It may sounds difficult but if you are using Cocoa or if you are following Apple’s advices, you are almost done with this part.
And once you are done with this part, the rest can be done much easier.
On the other hand, if you don’t start thinking internationalization today and then change your mind after your next major update, the transition can be a bit more painful.
So start taking an action today. And if you are planning to attend WWDC next month, consider joining some of the internationalization sessions.
By webmaster@oreillynet.com (Nobi Hayashi). [Mac DevCenter]
4:08:05 PM 
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