Sooner or later, most of us who work with international software products find untranslated strings popping up in the middle of our translated user interface (UI). These don’t usually prevent the product from running properly, but they are most unwelcome, and we devote a lot of time to eliminating them so that our customers don’t find them and complain about them.

As the Pareto Principle suggests, we have taken care of 80% of the strings in the product with only 20% of our effort, but the last 20% of the strings seems to require 80% of our effort. In this article, we’ll explore the process of eradicating untranslated strings.