Localization:
• Adaptation of a product, application or document content to meet the language, cultural and other requirements of a specific target market (a "locale"). Sometimes written as "l10n", where 10 is the number of letters between 'l' and 'n'.
• This Includes
1. Translating text content, software source code, web sites, or database content; machine translation may be used in early stages.
2. Adjusting graphic and visual elements and examples to make them culturally appropriate
Internationalization
• Design and development of a product, application or document content that enables easy localization for target audiences that vary in culture, region, or language. Often written "i18n", where 18 is the number of letters between 'i' and 'n'
• Typically entails:
1. Designing and developing in a way that removes barriers to localization or international deployment. Includes things such as Enabling the use of Unicode
2. Providing support for features that may not be used until localization occurs, like Adding markup in your DTD to support bidirectional text, or for identifying language
3. Enabling code to support local, regional, language, or culturally related preferences. Involves, like user preferences of date and time formats.
4. Separating localizable elements from source code or content
Globalization
• An approach to business strategy that aims to address all of the logistical and organizational challenges an enterprise faces as it expands its supporting content, assets and message across cultures and markets to new clients.
• Incorporates internationalization and localization to achieve this goal.
• Describes a comprehensive process that incorporates, augments, and extends:
1. Research on and identification of global markets
2. Market validation and selection
4. Identification and formalization of global business requirements
5. Identification of cross-market affinities (to enable marketing and technology asset reuse)
6. Alignment with and support for Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n) processes.
Internationalization Vocabulary
• Character encodings are byte-stream representations for individual characters, like US-ASCII, ISO Latin 1, Shift-JIS, Big-5, UTF-8, etc.
• Character vs. glyph: A character, also known as a code point, is a unique character within a set of characters, also known as a code page. A glyph is merely the visual representation of a character
• Language Designations, like ISO 639-1/ ISO 639-2: uses a two/three letter code to identify a language
• Regional Designations, like ISO 3166-1:uses a two-letter, capitalized code to identify a specific country
• Language ID
1. Designates a written language (or orthography) and can reflect either the generic language or a specific dialect of that language
2. To specify a language ID, you use a language designator by itself. To specify a specific dialect of a language, you use a hyphen to combine a language designator with a region designator
3. Thus, the English language as it is spoken in Great Britain would yield a language ID of en-GB, while the English language spoken in the United States would have a language ID of en-US
• Locale ID
1. Identifies a specific location where a given language is spoken
2. To specify a locale ID, use an underscore character to combine a language designator with a region designator
3. The locale ID for English-language speakers in Great Britain is en_GB, while the locale for English-speaking residents of the United States is en_US
4. Although locale IDs and language IDs might seem nearly identical, there is a subtle difference: A language ID identifies a written and spoken language only AND A locale identifies a region and its conventions and has a more cultural context.
• Locales are identified as the tuple
1. en, en_US, en_US_SouthernDrawl, en_US == en-us
2. Note that the language is lowercase and the country is uppercase
3. In Java, these are separated by an underscore
4. Browsers lowercase everything and separate them with a dash to send the locale identifiers in the Accept-Language header of the HTTP request
