Software Internationalization Guide

Understanding Internationalization Concepts
Software Internationalization Guide—526225-002
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What Is a Locale?
religious references, humor, and many more culturally dependent aspects must be
adapted for each locale. For example, mailboxes around the world have a great
variety of shapes, so an icon depicting an American rural mailbox is unlikely to be
understood by most of the world's inhabitants,
What Is a Locale?
A locale is the part of a user’s environment that defines the user’s language and
cultural preferences or conventions. Each locale within a computer system contains
information specific to each combination of supported language, cultural data, and
code set. A locale contains information such information as:
•
Collating sequence information, to determine the sorting order of characters
defined in the locale
•
Character classification information, to provide details about the type of character
associated with each legal character code—for example, whether it is an
alphabetic, uppercase, lowercase, punctuation, control, or space character
•
Case-conversion information, to identify the possible other case of each legal
character code—for example, to shift from uppercase to lowercase in languages
whose alphabets include uppercase and lowercase characters
•
Language information, to describe the format and setting of locale-specific cultural
data—for example, date and time formats
Internationalization and localization involve more than simple geographic regions. A
geographic region can consist of many different locales, each having a language,
culture, and code set of its own. For example, US English differs from British English
in date, time, and monetary formats. There are also territories where more than one
language is spoken. For example, Switzerland has four official languages—French,
German, Italian, and Romansch.
See Section 2, Software Characteristics That Vary by Locale, for more information.
How do You Begin Internationalizing
Software?
The basis of internationalizing an application is the separation of a program’s base
function from its culturally sensitive data. Base function includes the algorithms, logic,
and purpose of the program. For example, the base function of a database is storage
and retrieval of information, regardless of the culture in which it is used.
Culturally sensitive data includes such elements as error messages, date formats, time
formats, currency formats, collation schemes, character sets, and code sets.
Figure 1-3 on page 1-5 illustrates a program in which culturally sensitive data is
isolated from the program source code.