“All the world’s a stage,” wrote William Shakespeare. But not all the players upon it 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. Because 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.[31]
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
See also the relatively new book Java Internationalization, by Andy Deitsch and David Czarnecki (O’Reilly).
[31] Sometimes written L9N by those who can’t count, or who think that L10N that looks too much like “lion.”
18.191.29.22