Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 15. Internationalization and
Localization
Introduction
“All the world's a stage,” wrote William Shakespeare. But not all the players upon that great
and turbulent stage speak the great Bard's native tongue. To be usable on a global scale, your
software needs to communicate in many different languages. The menu labels, button strings,
dialog messages, title bar titles, and even command-line error messages must be settable to
the user's choice of language. This is the topic of
internationalization
and
localization
. Be-
cause these words take a long time to say and write, they are often abbreviated by their first
and last letters and the count of omitted letters, that is, I18N and L10N.
Java provides a
Locale
class to discover/control the internationalization settings. A default
Locale
is inherited from operating system runtime settings when Java starts up and can be
used most of the time!
IAN'S BASIC STEPS: INTERNATIONALIZATION
Internationalization and localization consist of:
Sensitivity training (Internationalization or I18N)
Making your software sensitive to these issues
Language lessons (Localization or L10N)
Writing configuration files for each language
Culture lessons (optional)
Customizing the presentation of numbers, fractions, dates, and message formatting
For more information, see
Java Internationalization
by Andy Deitsch and David Czarnecki.
