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Internationalization

An application that can present information to users according to regional cultural conventions is said to be internationalized: The application can be configured to interact with users from different localities in culturally appropriate ways.

If a product has been translated to the chosen language, users of an internationalized application see error messages and interface elements in the chosen language. Date and time formats, as well as currencies, are presented appropriately for users in the specified region.

Historically, the creation of internationalized applications has been restricted to large corporations writing complex systems. However, given the rise in distributed computing and in the use of the World Wide Web, application developers are pressured to internationalize a much wider variety of applications. This trend requires making internationalization techniques much more accessible to application developers.

Internationalization of an application is driven by two variables, the time zone and the locale. The time zone indicates how to compute the local time as an offset from a standard time like Greenwich Mean Time. The locale is a collection of information about language, currency, and the conventions for presenting information like dates. A time zone can cover many locales, and a single locale can span time zones. With both time zone and locale, the date, time, currency, and language for users in a specific region can be determined.


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Timestamp iconLast updated: 13 Dec 2005
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