Introduction

Quick overview of i18n issues

Most early developments in computing took place in Europe and particularly the US
All aspects of computing have been heavily influenced by the US, with a little leavening by Europe
The character sets used are basically US
Input and output mechanisms are tuned to these character sets
Words used in menus, dialogues, etc are English words

There are about 6,000 living languages in the world (3,000 of them in Papua New Guinea!)
A few languages use the "english" characters but most do not
- French, German, etc use similar sets with individual character differences
- Some have their own characters, such as a Thai
- Others such as Chinese are hierographic-based
There are about 150 countries recognised by the UN and 240 by the ISO, and many of these have regional groups (such as the Welsh in Britain) and unrecognised groups (such as the Basque separatists) in Spain
There are many different currencies in the world: pound, dollar (many different ones!), franc, euro, baht, yuan, ringgit, ...
There are many different calendars: muslim, thai, chinese, ...
People write addresses in different ways: Chinese start with the country on first line, with name at the bottom
Names are represented in different ways: some cultures do not even have two names, and only the Christian's have "christian name" as well as "surname"
About 70% of the Web is in English, but only 40% of web users hae English as first language

"i18n" is the process of removing all cultural differences from programs: not in how they are written (still use C, Java, ...) but in how they present their interfaces to "users" (people or other programs)

For example, instead of


      JButton = new JButton("Quit")

you would have


      JButton = new JButton(quitStr)

where quitStr has a "soft-coded" value

i18n involves removing hard-coded strings, numbers, dates, amounts, ...
The Japanese would not use an early version of Lotus 123 because it "beeped" on every input error - this was audible, and caused the worker to "lose face"
i18n attempts to abstract anything that might change between different cultures

Some applications need to use several languages at once (e.g. translation program)
Applications that can handle multiple languages are "globalised"
One common font system (Unicode) can handle many concurrent languages, but not any two of Chinese, Korean and Japanese

This is from Sun Software Product Internationalization Taxonomy. Look there at Chapter 5 for links that work

			User Interfaces			Program Interfaces
			Command line	Character	Graphical	Application Protocols	Storage and Interchange	Application Programming
1. Translatable Product Components
	1.1 Translation negotiations, defaults, and selection
	1.2 Textual objects
		1.2.1 Fixed textual objects
		1.2.2 Messages
		1.2.3 Help systems and documentation
	1.3 Non-textual objects
		1.3.1 Icons, images, and colors
		1.3.2 GUI objects
		1.3.3 Sounds
		1.3.4 Other
2. Cultural formatting and processing
	2.1 Culture negotiations, defaults, and selection
	2.2 Abstract objects
		2.2.1 Time, date, and calendar
		2.2.2 Numeric, monetary, and metric
	2.3 Structured text
		2.3.1 Ordered lists (collation)
		2.3.2 Personal names, honorifics, and titles
		2.3.3 Addresses
		2.3.4 Other formatting and layout
	2.4 Language processing
		2.4.1 Lexical and grammatical
		2.4.2 Phonology and sound-to-text
3. Text foundation and writing systems
	3.1 Writing system negotiations, defaults, and selection
	3.2 Plain text representation
		3.2.1 Characters (semantics and codespaces)
		3.2.2 Strings (encoding methods and transcoding)
	3.3 I/O and interchange
		3.3.1 Transfer encoding (8-bit clean)
		3.3.2 Device input (keyboard and input methods)
		3.3.3 Device output (font management, rendering, and output methods)

Tex Texin has a table of shoe sizes around the world - i18n affects lots of things!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
The moral right of Jan Newmarch to be identified as the author of this page has been asserted.