Globalization and Localization

Applications must be designed to accommodate users from various cultures. Users in different parts of the world use different languages and different formatting standards for numbers, currency, and dates. International applications should be customizable according to the preferences of users belonging to different nations, cultures, or regions.

An application uses the locale to identify the preference of a user. The local is the combination of a language and a country. For example, the locale of a user speaking English and belonging to the United States is "en-US". The locale includes information about the formats used for representing time and date, symbols and conventions used for representing currency, and the character encoding scheme being used.

The structure of an internationalized application is divided into two blocks:

• Code Block: Contains the application code or the executable part of an application. This block will remain the same for all locales.
• Data Block: Contains all the resources, such as text and images used by the user interface (UI). This block is locale-specific, and each locale will have one data block.

The process of making  an application ready for customers is called internationalization. It includes three phases:

Globalization: 

Involves writing the executable code for an application in such a way that makes it culture-neutral and language-neutral. While incorporating globalization, you must ensure that the culture-specific details are not hard-coded into the executable code. The primary task in this phase is to identify the various locale-sensitive resources and to isolate these resources from the executable code.

Localizability:

An application that has been globalized must be tested to ensure that its executable code is independent of the culture and language-specific data. This is called localizability testing. The focus of localizability testing is to check how the application adapts itself to different locales.

Localization:

Involves the customization of an application for a specific locale. One major task in this phase is the translation of resources identified during the globalization phase. During this phase, various resources, such as images and text, for the designated locale are created.

• When designing an international application, you should ensure the following factors:

User Interface (UI): The language used to design different UI components, such as menu, message box, static-text holder (label), is not fixed during design phase of the application.
Information Formats: The formats of different elements, such as currency, number, and date, are not fixed during design phase of the application.

The different aspects of an application that should be taken into account while incorporating localization are:

• Formats: The formats used for displaying numbers, time, dates and currency should be considered while incorporating localization.

Graphics: The locale-sensitive graphics, such as maps, traffic signs, and calendar should be considered while incorporating localization.