Java Enterprise Best Practices

Internationalization and Localization

For the most part, software that has not been internationalized will not work outside the country for which it was originally developed. Why, you ask? To understand why, you need to be aware of only a small subset of issues that face developers who design and write internationalized software:

• Text displayed to a user must be translated to different languages. It must therefore not be hardcoded into the program but externalized and loaded at runtime.

• Many languages use non-Latin writing systems (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Korean, Russian, Thai, etc.).

• Some writing systems are bidirectional (text flows both left to right and right to left).

• Colors have semantic meaning depending on the region of the world you are in (e.g., red in the Western Hemisphere usually denotes a warning, danger, or stop, while in China red denotes happiness).

• Different languages have different rules for how characters should be sorted. This includes languages that share the same writing system, such as Danish, English, French, and German.

• Numbers can have different shapes depending on the writing system and region of the world you are in.

• Dates are formatted differently in different parts of the world (e.g., 06/10/02 could be June 10^th 2002, October 6^th 2002, or even October 2^nd, 2006!).

This list only scratches the surface of the kinds of issues that must be taken into account when internationalizing software. Take a moment to think about the number of times you have written ...