Software Internationalization Guide

Understanding Internationalization Concepts

Software Internationalization Guide—526225-002

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Languages, Cultures, and Code Sets

These examples describe a few differences among languages, cultures, and code sets

that are encountered in international applications:

•

Symbols and rules that apply to the development language are often not

appropriate to a language in which the product might be used.

For example, a computer prompt that displays the phrase yes or no in the English

language is not appropriate for Spanish-speaking users who expect to see the

phrase sí o no. The word sí is not recognized as a valid word in computer

implementations of the English language because the character í is not a valid

character in the English alphabet.

•

Currency symbols, date formats, and time formats vary by culture.

For example, the monetary symbol in the United States is the dollar sign, $.

Japan’s monetary symbol that signifies the yen is ¥.

•

Social expressions vary between cultures.

For example, in Western cultures the “first” name is the given name and the “last”

name is the family name. In some Asian cultures, however, the family name

comes first and then the given name.

•

Code sets assign specific numeric values to characters within a computer. Code

sets vary by geographic area, and even vary within a single geographic area.

For example, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is

not compatible with the Extended Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code

(EBCDIC), a code system developed by the IBM Corporation. Applications that

make no assumptions about the encoding of character data are called code-set

independent applications and are illustrated by Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1. Internationalized Application Supporting Several Languages

Internationalized

Software

Product

VST001.vsd

Spanish

English

French

German

Japanese

Irish

Italian

Russian