Software Internationalization

Anonymous Coward writes "It seems that the folks over at O'Reilly have quietly released a book entitled, "Java Internationalization". The website for the book can be reached from the Java O'Reilly site, . The authors also have a website dedicated to the book. I'm curious as to how developers are treating software internationalization, not just in Java, but in other programming languages like C#, C++, Perl. For software designers out there today, is internationalization and localization a forethought or an afterthought? Is Java the only viable language for writing truly multi-lingual applications?"

Comments

Non sequitur

[babbage]

Why should Java be the only internationalizable -- ugh, that's too long -- the only I10N-able language? If you put in a bit of forethought -- abstract all your strings out into language specific resource files / db entries / whatever, ditto for images -- then a basic level of I10N should be and in fact is achievable in any programming language.

The tricky part has nothing to do with coding language preference, but in the overall design of the application itself. Provided that you can come up with acceptable translations of all your output strings -- which itself can be tricky -- that still doesn't really address more subtle interface issues you might face, depending on what you're trying to do.

For web design, it could be worthwhile to have drastically different versions of your content for different locales -- IKEA and the BBC are interesting case studies for this. For other applications, one interface framework might be fine, but really this involves a lot of work and study of your target audience, and it goes far beyond (and is much more interesting than) the question of what language you code in.

That said, Unicode is a truly terrifying thing, and any language that makes it easier to work with is a welcome thing. Java supposedly uses Unicode internally, and if that helps as much as it seems like it should then great. Otherwise, or maybe even still, you face a much gentler slope in going to other Latinish languages (most of the European ones and any of the others that have adopted that alphabet or at least have a cultural standard for & acceptance of it (thus Japanese counts, Chinese doesn't), to anything with a much different character set (Russian, Arabic, Hebrew) and beyond (the CJKV languages -- Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese).

I can deal with the prospect of planning for French, German, Spanish, and Italian versions of work that I do, but having to go beyond that is a very daunting prospect. And, of course, and interesting one... :)