The article narrates a humorous account from a reader named Colin, a front-end developer who faced a daunting task of localizing thousands of static HTML documents from UK English to US English. Without a content management system, Colin's team employed regular expressions for the task, only to encounter absurd mistakes like misnaming the famous painter Vincent Van Gogh as 'Vincent Truck Gogh.' This anecdote highlights the quirky challenges of localization in web development.
Suddenly we needed to localize thousands of online articles, lessons, and other documents into American English.
Our system combined tackling spelling swaps like changing 'ae' to 'e' in words like 'archaeology' and word/phrase swaps so that British terms like 'post' were changed to the American 'mail.'
The fact it was running the replacements directly on the body HTML, and causing lots of page repaints, meant we had to build a REST API to cache which rules ran and didn't run for each page.
One day we got a call asking why a lesson about famous artists referred to the great painter 'Vincent Truck Gogh.'
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