e-business Globalization Solution Design Guide: Getting Started

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2002. All rights reserved. 13

Chapter 3. How to implement globalization

Generally speaking, globalization belongs in the category of ease-of-use technologies.

Offering ease-of-use solutions to your customers is critical to business success. Various

globalization elements are available for ease-of-use solutions, ranging from the explicit to the

subtle. This chapter gives a brief introduction to implementing globalization, and the

remainder of the book adds many detailed explanations and examples.

Globalization functions can be enabled by the operating system, software product, or

business application. The operating system usually provides basic support, being the

minimum set of baseline requirements that a globalization solution needs, but all three work

together in the following ways in order to provide an integrated and seamless globalized

solution:

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1. The end user can input, view, and print characters from diverse languages, and a system

should be able to accept data, process it, and output results correctly.

Some languages such as English, French, German, and Spanish are easy to handle,

while others are complicated in terms of the programming required for computer

processing. Scripts such as Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic are called complex display

languages. Hebrew and Arabic have letters that are displayed from right to left. Since they

also mix in other languages and numbers that display from left to right, they require what

is called bi-directional support. Thai and again Arabic have characters that change vertical

position or shape depending on the characters around them, and require contextual

support.

Special devices are being visualized and then designed by globalization professionals as

new script requirements emerge. The standard keyboard is the most common input

medium, while desktop or notebook displays and printers are the most prevalent output

devices. Software assistants such as Input Method Editors (IMEs) are employed to

support data entry of composed characters or large character sets. Now that pervasive

computing devices such as cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and pagers

have increasingly important roles, they are constantly being equipped with new

input/output mechanisms as research labs continue turning out their pioneering

technologies. On-screen keyboards not only beautify the appearance of computers to an

unprecedented extent, but also bring improved functionality to the end user. Speech

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The four categories here follow IBM G11N organization's opinions, which can be found in

http://eou2.austin.ibm.com/global/global_int.nsf/Publish/982. However, the details are written by GCL.

14 e-Business Globalization Solution Design Guide

recognition introduces a brand-new input method with unprecedented globalization

challenges in that computers now must recognize numerous spoken languages and

dialects. Handwriting recognition similarly helps people get closer to the computer and

more easily, while challenging it to detect various written scripts and personal-chore

graphics.

Figure 3-1 Voice technology architecture

So that physical devices can support the full character set of diversified languages, the

operating system must at the very least provide corresponding support for IMEs, fonts,

and layout software.

2. Correct cultural support of data. For example, date/time/number/currency must be

displayed/processed appropriately in formats that users prefer. (See Chapter 6, “Locale

model” on page 23.) Cultural support can be accomplished through the use of locales and

locale-sensitive functions. IBM's recommended cultural support solution is International

Components for Unicode (ICU), an open source project that it sponsors. ICU can be

provided to operating systems, software products, and business applications to meet their

globalization needs.

Advanced cultural support might involve business logic. For example, income tax

calculators must reflect tax amounts based on nation-specific income policies and the

individual's reported income.

3. Multilingual support through Unicode technology. Unicode is the universal

character-encoding scheme for written characters and text, including character sets used

by many of the world's written scripts. By providing a consistent way for handling

multilingual text interchange internationally, Unicode is in widespread use today. It has

been widely accepted as the default encoding for many industry standards such as HTML

and XML that enable Java's capabilities for multilingual support, thus providing one of the

principal foundations of e-business.

4. Users can choose language and cultural preferences. The working example introduced in

Part 3, “Our Global Travel Shanghai Demo: A working example” on page 61 clearly

explains how to make this happen.

Dialogic Hardware and Software

VoiceXML

Browser

Reco

Engine

TTS

Engine

VoiceXML

Browser

Reco

Engine

TTS

Engine

Language Support Component

Telephony and Media Component

System Management Component

Public Switched

Telephone Network

VoiceXML

Voice Technology Architecture

Web/Application

Server

Enterprise

Server

Global

VoiceXML

Application

Enterprise

Data