pawel_dyda

It might be somehow hard to believe, but Ukrainian is actually distinctive language with different words, different phonemes and orthography. It's not interchangeable with Polish.

Ethnically (genetically) we're more closer to Russians and Ukrainians (much more than Czechs or Slovaks). Linguistically we are very close to Serbs and Croatians, then Czechs and Slovaks and not very close to Russians (there are important differences), but obviously as Slaves we have to be closer to other Slaves. However, when it comes to social psychology we're much closer to Americans. If we talking about cultural inspirations, we are much more influenced by ancient Rome and Greece, classical literature and arts than to other Slavic nations.

I have to disagree completely. Problem is, I am native speaker... I presume it was written by the Dutchman. Well, there are reasons why we keep ó and u and treat it separately. The reason is, it's a different phoneme. ó is open, said with round lips, while u is posterior syllable. Totally different sound. The same goes with other phonemes that are simply not represented in Cyrillic, such as ch (posterior version of h). Political reasons apart (Russians actually tried to impose there spelling here and it didn't go well; see metrical books written in Cyrillic - incorrect spelling, translating first names, etc.), there are reasons why we keep our specific spellings.

Personally, I can't see why we keep using cz instead of č or sz instead of š. But I know that historically speaking we did. It came from Czech. There are few remains, for instance ł (which does not sound like l, it sounds more like wh in which, what, why ;) ). The funny thing Czech people dropped it :) But this is another story; it probably has something to do with national pride. To some extent Cyrillic might have something to do with pride and independence, but the fact is Polish is very far from Russian (it's Western Slavonic language after all) and there are many sounds that there is no way to properly describe in it. Problem is, these sound might be hard to distinguish for people that does not use Polish as their mother tongue... Tough luck :)

Logitech Elite Keyboard for its volume jog and "mouse" wheel to scroll web pages.

As someone with over 10 years of professional experience in g11n, I must point out few things.

First and foremost i18n is not about extracting strings to make application translatable. Before you actually do that you should think what actual markets you will be targeting. Actually, even by your rough description of what your application will do, I can tell you that the major will be cultural fit. You may think that people tend to do business roughly the same way all other the world. And nothing could be farther from the truth.

Should you ever want to sell it outside US, you should think how to suite your target users' needs. And this is much more related to behaviors / workflows than to translation.

By the way, I don't care that much if something is translated, what I care most is how things like date, time and currency is presented. This is crucial; I can't comprehend dates like 4/11 quickly.

To answer your specific questions.

1) Frankly, I have no idea about percentage. Personally I tend to use English versions if that's possible as Polish translations tend to be horrible. Well, it is usually result of concatenating strings which does not allow for re-ordering the sentence, but still.

2) I already answered to some extent. I actually prefer everything to be in one language (be it my native Polish or English). Having part of UI in English and part translated is really irritating. And as I said, following local formats is much important.

3) This depends on your user base. In case of Poland, I believe financial / marketing people will use so many English terms that untranslated app would be easier to grasp. Should you follow local formats (or allow to change them in user preferences), that is.