Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C#

Chapter 14

Internationalization and Localization

What's in This Chapter?

• Defining internationalization, localization, and globalization
• Considerations for a localization strategy
• Defining and selecting default resources
• Translating text and controls
• Localizing strings and other resources
• Formatting dates, numbers, and strings

Internationalization and localization are two different aspects of providing multilingual and multicultural support for software applications. Although the exact definitions of these two terms may vary, the two concepts can be broadly defined as follows:

• Internationalization refers to the process of globally enabling an application to handle multicultural settings without specifically designing to any particular locale.
• Localization refers to the effort of designing an application to cater to the needs of a specific locale by specifically targeting the desired locale via application code and settings adjustments.

Using internationalization, you enable your application to handle a number of different language and cultural scenarios. In many ways, you can think of internationalization as enabling multiple-language support on more of a global application level. In the context of Mono for Android, you can largely achieve this by leveraging the tools within the .NET Framework. Internationalization endeavors may include the following:

• Making list storing sensitive to language
• Adhering to local specific formatting on different data units such as date and time ...