The most important factor for every decision is that you know for whom you are designing and developing your applications. To determine the answer to this question, ask yourself and your potential customers these types of questions.
The answer to this question makes a significant difference if you define your marketplace in different countries or only in the area of your own language, or if you decide to include countries speaking other languages. For example, if you are coding an application from a Latin-based language, application complexity increases when you decide to include countries using non-Latin languages such as Hebrew, Chinese, or Japanese. The application complexity increases because you need to deal with incompatible characters sets and more complex input methods.
Along with the language problem, there are other areas to consider. You need to understand the culture, habits, ways of doing business, and laws of the target markets. You need to understand the customers' ways of life for you to be accepted as a business partner, to be able to get into the market, and to support them in their countries.
These factors can affect:
You must understand the requirements that future users of your application will have. For example, do they want to:
All these factors affect the design you choose, the way your application is able to switch from one language environment to another, and how data presentation and conversion take place.
After you understand the requirements for your customers and their end users, you can decide what kind of cultural-sensitive information you need to store and maintain, the type of data presentation, which parts you need to translate, and how your application must be able to be integrated in the different environments.
To estimate the expected revenue, analyze the places you have chosen as your target market. After you know the requirements, you should be able to determine the effort and costs. This amount allows you to compare the costs against the expected revenue.
The initial cost of enabling an application for national language support might be higher. But consider that the enabling steps are based more on normal modular and data-driven design techniques, which improve the quality of your application even without NLS enabling. Because a good design helps people to understand and describe the application system, you will receive a certain return on the investment. A good design helps to improve productivity of development and maintenance. You have the additional effort of designing and implementing the application only once, even for many different language versions. Compared to retrofitting an existing application, it is much less expensive to plan and design it from the very beginning.