THANKS RE: internationalize and localize

[Jennifer Itatani <jitatani -at- esri -dot- com>]

All,

Thank you for your responses both online and offline. It appears that the
software is indeed localized.

Jennifer Itatani
Technical Writer
Database Services, ESRI
909-793-2853, 1-2900


-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Margulis [mailto:margulis -at- fiam -dot- net]
Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2003 9:15 AM
To: Jennifer Itatani
Cc: TECHWR-L
Subject: Re: internationalize and localize




Jennifer Itatani wrote:

>Have these become synonyms, or are there subtle differences between the
two?
>
>  
>
Jennifer,

They are not synonyms, at least as far as software is concerned.

Internationalization is creating or modifying the software architecture 
so that the software can work in multiple languages. For example, all 
the text strings that show up in the user interface should be stored 
somewhere other than the code that draws the interface--in a database 
table, a .dll, a text file, or some other structure. And the space 
available for writing those text strings to the interface has to 
accommodate different-length strings. And there has to be a mechanism 
for selecting the language to use--either at installation or preferably 
through user selection on the fly. And there has to be a mechanism for 
accommodating different character sets, including double-byte sets.

Localization is, as I understand it, providing the dataset (the strings, 
date formats, currency types, other constants) for one or more specific 
locales. How narrowly specified those locales are may vary from 
implementation to implementation. For example, it may be sufficient for 
some freeware tool to offer "Spanish,"  "French," and "English" as the 
choices, without regard for what hemisphere the language is spoken in, 
let alone what country. For a major product, though, you'd want to offer 
a lot more choices.

Dick

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