Software Internationalization Guide

Software Internationalization Guide—526225-002
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Software Characteristics That Vary
by Locale
The primary goal of internationalization is to develop software that meets the needs of
all languages and cultures. This section describes a few of the world’s writing systems,
and discusses issues that must be considered for internationalization.
Writing Systems
Writing systems differ in the symbols they use, the direction in which those symbols
are written and read, and the manner in which they are grouped. This section
discusses three of the world’s major writing systems—Latin-based writing systems,
Arabic, and East Asian.
Latin
Latin-based writing systems are block-based, as shown in Figure 2-1, and are written
from left to right. Block-based writing systems consist of characters that stand alone.
They include the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets as well as Latin.
Most Western European languages use the Latin writing system as a base—for
example, Danish, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, and Spanish.
Latin-based scripts have also been devised for languages that are not derived from
Latin—for example, Malay, Swahili, and Vietnamese.
Languages within the Latin-based writing system differ in some ways. Most Western
European languages that are based on the Latin alphabet add characters to the
alphabet, incorporating accent marks and other symbols. These marks and symbols
are called diacriticals.
For example, the French alphabet, like English, begins with the character A and ends
with the character Z, but contains accents and other marks that are absent from the
English alphabet—for example, ç. The Danish alphabet is another example of a
language that includes diacriticals—it begins with the character A and ends with the
character Å.
Some languages omit characters from the Latin alphabet base—for example,
Hungarian omits the characters Q and W. Some languages omit characters and add
others—for example, Italian omits the characters K, W, X, and Y but includes such
characters as è.
Figure 2-1. Block-Based Writing
Bonjour