Understanding Internationalisation
Internationalisation refers to the design and development of software applications that can be easily adapted to different languages, regions, and cultures without requiring significant engineering changes.
Common Mistake
- Internationalisation is the process of designing software so that it can be easily adapted to various languages and regions.
- Localisation is the actual adaptation of the software for a specific language or region.
Key Features Enabling Internationalisation
Unicode support
- Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that represents text in most of the world's writing systems.
- It allows developers to handle multilingual text seamlessly, ensuring that characters from different languages are displayed correctly as Unicode includes over 143,000 characters, covering most of the world's writing systems, including Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, and more.
- Includes encoding standards such as
- UTF-8: A variable-length encoding that is backwards-compatible with ASCII (widely used on the web and in modern applications).
- UTF-16: A fixed-length encoding used by languages like Java and C# for internal string representation.
- UTF-32: A fixed-length encoding that uses four bytes per character, providing direct access to any Unicode character.
Example
In Java, the String class uses Unicode by default, allowing you to store and manipulate text in any language.
Locale-specific formatting
- Modern languages provide libraries to format dates, times, numbers, and currencies according to local conventions.
- This ensures that users see information in a familiar format, enhancing usability.
Self review
Why is Unicode important for internalisation?
