[ Thanks to Linux User &
Developer magazine for this link. ]
“Let’s admit it, writing applications is a complex
thing to do; it requires lot of blood and sweat. After putting so
much effort into creating an application it would be shame to see
it not being used just because it was only available in English.
The bottom line is; most people pay more attention and give more
respect to a product which is available in their own language. By
its very nature, open source software qualifies as some of the most
translated on the planet. If you want to seek a global audience for
your software, it is very important that you localise your
application for your users. Here’s how…“The Basics
“Technical terms involved in internationalisation can be very
daunting, so let’s clear these before proceeding. The following are
the key components that make up the complete internationalisation
framework…“Locale: A locale is the part of a user’s environment that
brings together information about how to handle data that is
specific to the end user’s particular country, language or
territory. The locale is typically installed as part of the
operating system. Usually a locale identifier consists of at least
a language identifier and a region identifier. It is defined in
this format: [language[_territory][.codeset][@modifier]]. For
example, British English using the UTF-8 encoding is en_GB.UTF-8.
(More on character sets later in this article.) The same code also
defines the territorial convention for spelling, currency, date
format etc.:”