Visual Studio and Internationalization

Our developer customer base for Visual Studio is truly global.  A significant portion of the Visual Studio user base is international, and as a result, we spend a lot of time and energy making sure that Visual Studio yields a great experience, regardless of locale, and we continually strive to improve that experience.

One recent manifestation of this was in how we handled language releases for Visual Studio 2012.  In previous versions of Visual Studio, we would first ship the English version, and weeks later we would subsequently ship versions of Visual Studio localized into multiple languages.  For Visual Studio 2012, we changed our internal processes so that when we shipped, we shipped all of our 10 languages simultaneously: English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.  All 10 languages are available from the Visual Studio download site.

This commitment continued with the recently released Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 (Visual Studio 2012.1) for which we also simultaneously released all 10 languages.

Beyond these 10 languages, however, Visual Studio can also be extended via additional “community” language packs.  Throughout the Visual Studio 2012 product cycle, we maintained close partnerships with prestigious universities and with Microsoft Valued Professionals (MVPs) from around the world, with the goal of supporting additional languages in Visual Studio 2012.  The resulting community language packs, available for Czech, Polish, Turkish, and Brazilian Portuguese, provide a localized experience for the majority of the Visual Studio user interface, with hundreds of thousands of localized words. These community language packs are available for download for Visual Studio Professional, Premium, and Ultimate, as well as for multiple Express versions.

Of course, the need for localized content extends well beyond the Visual Studio user interface.  One of the largest sources of such content is the Visual Studio documentation on MSDN, available in all 14 previously mentioned languages.  This translated content comes from a variety of sources, including Visual Studio team members, machine translation, and the community.  You, too, can contribute, using the MSDN Translation Wiki, which enables you to suggest improved translations and be recognized for your contributions via the MSDN and TechNet recognition system.  For more info, see the Developer Content Localization Team’s blog.

Moving forward, we strive to improve further upon the global experience we provide with Visual Studio, and we look forward to any and all assistance you provide in that endeavor.

Namaste!

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