Software Internationalization Guide

Glossary
Software Internationalization Guide—526225-002
Glossary-4
ideograph
ideograph. A character or symbol representing a word or idea. Some writing systems, such
as Japanese and Chinese, use thousands of ideographs.
IEEE. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. IEEE is a professional organization
whose committees develop and propose computer standards that define the physical
and data link protocols of entities such as communication networks. IEEE formed the
POSIX standard.
internationalization. The process of designing and coding software so it can be adapted to
meet the needs of different languages, cultures and coded character sets, with the
ability to handle a variety of linguistic and cultural conventions. Also referred to as
“I18N”, which is an abbreviation derived from the 18 letters between the between the
initial “I” and final “N” of the word “internationalization.”
ISO. International Organization for Standardization. ISO is an international body that drafts,
discusses, proposes, and specifies standards for network protocols. ISO is best known
for its seven-layer reference model that describes the conceptual organization of
protocols.
ISO is sometimes called the "International Standards Organization"; although ISO is
the official abbreviation, it does not correspond to the organization’s name in any
language.
ISO 10646. A universal coded character set (UCS) established by ISO to represent all
characters and symbols from all commonly used languages. ISO 10646 characters
are encoded in multiple octets in which code space is divided into four units—group,
plane, row, and cell. Includes a combining character method of encoding to allow any
number of combining characters to follow a base character.
ISO 8859. A series of ISO standard 8-bit code sets used to represent languages based on
many alphabets, including Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Turkish, and Arabic. The
ISO 8859 code sets are used in international applications that must be data
transparent. ASCII is a subset of each of the ISO 8859 code sets.
JIS. The Japanese Industrial Standard. JIS is a group that creates standard code sets for
Japanese.
Kana. A collective name for Katakana and Hiragana (the two types of phonetic Japanese
characters).
Kanji. An ancient ideographic form of writing used in Japan; the form originated in China.
Katakana. One of the two Japanese phonetic character sets (the other is Hiragana).
Japanese keyboards are often labeled with Katakana to enable users to type Japanese
words phonetically.
KS. The Korean Standard. KS is a group that creates standard code sets for Korean.