Software Internationalization

Introduction

With the growing software market far beyond the English-speaking world, it's important for the software to be world-ready for all potential customers. To make that happen, the most important step is to design the software with globalization in mind.

The following sections provide some generic information about the concepts of globalization, localizability, and localization.

Data encoding

• Encoding overview

• Transformation of Unicode code points

• Byte order mark (file signature)

• Surrogate pairs

• Code pages

Locale and Culture Awareness

• Locale

• Sorting and string comparison

• Calendars

• Date formatting

• Time formatting

• Currency Formatting

• Number formatting

• Addresses

• Telephone numbers

• Paper size

• Units of measurement

Input, output, and display

• Text input, output, and display

• Text rendering

• Page or text alignment

• Text justification

• Font tchnology

• Line and word breaking

• Mirroring

• Overlay text properties

Localizability

• Localizability overview

• Isolate localizable resources

• String handling

• Mirroring awareness

• UI considerations

Localization

• Localization overview

• Localization elements

• Localization tools

• Localization team

• Establishing localization guidelines

• Content localization

Testing for world readiness

• Quality assurance for world-readiness

• The world-ready approach to testing

• Testing globalization

• Testing localizability

• Testing localization

• The role of test tools

• Sample world-ready test cases