Jianjun Zhang

Jianjun is a web/software localization professional based in Tianjin, China. He's been working with Beluga Linguistics since 2006 and involved in English to Chinese localization projects such as last.fm, Swatch, XING and a number of other projects. Besides localization and translation, he also offers cultural consultation services and is an Aperian in-country specialist.

Jianjun has been following the latest web trends and developments. His personal blog is a fantastic source for local insights into the Chinese market. His blog can be found here:

Web Localization, i18n, Web 2.0, Culture, Translation 2.0, New Media and New Tech….

It's a great pleasure working with him. Professional and always helpful.

Quick Tips for Web Internationalization

In many of our projects we stumble over a series of technical issues in the source text/code we try to fix before the first words get translated in order to avoid re-adjustments later on once translation teams are on board and the project is running.

This part is commonly called internationalization (or i18n which stands for the 18 letters between the first and the last of this word). I18n of software is the way a software should be prepared in order to enable its translation in different languages and the successful localization (=L10n) to local target audiences.

Internationalization is nothing new and fortunately there is already a lot of written information about this topic out there in the web. One of the best places to get started is the W3C website about Internationalization and Localization.

Ricardo Matsushima

Ricardo is an Electrical Engineer from Brazil who's been involved in web development and programming since he was a kid and with technical documentation and translation since before the turn of the millennium.

At Beluga, Ricardo is responsible for the quality assurance of Brazilian Portuguese on the Last.fm project and he also has participated in other projects such as XING and MOO.

Outside of work he hits the road running for competition.