Chapter 19. Supporting Multiple Cultures and Languages

Internationalization is the process of building an application so that it can be adapted for different languages and regions. The Windows Phone Marketplace provides the opportunity to market an app to people from all over the world. Reaching such a broad audience of users requires that your software can be translated and otherwise adapted at runtime to be linguistically and culturally relevant to whomever is using it. This is the realm of internationalization and this chapter looks at the techniques to make your app world-ready.

It is crucial to devise efficient strategies for internationalization from the beginning of an app’s development. As development progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to retrofit support for multiple cultures.

This chapter begins by describing the terminology around internationalization; it then walks you through techniques and examples showing how to provision for runtime language changes and image localizability in your Windows Phone XAML apps.

Finally, the chapter touches on right-to-left support in Windows Phone.