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Introduction to Internationalization Programming Topics

Contents:

Organization of This Document
See Also

Today's applications are marketed to a global audience. Being able to sell your applications to that audience involve customizing your software for each target market. Users in a foreign country are not going to want a user interface in a language they do not understand. Similarly, there may be images that you find acceptable but which are considered quite rude in other cultures. The problem is how do you create software in a language that you do not understand? The answer is internationalization and localization.

Rather than rewrite your software for each language you want to support, you can internationalize it to support any language. Through localization, you can then translate user-visible text and images that can then be displayed by your application. This document helps you understand the steps needed to prepare your application for these processes.

Organization of This Document

This document includes the following articles:

• “Internationalization and Localization” introduces the process and terminology associated with internationalization and localization.

• “Support for Internationalization” describes the support for internationalization provided by Mac OS X.

• “Language and Locale Designations” describes the conventions for identifying languages and locales in your application.

• “Guidelines for Internationalization” provides tips to help you internationalize your software.

• “Getting the Current Language and Locale” shows you how to find out which localization is currently in effect.

• “Preparing Your Nib Files for Localization” provides tips for localizing your nib files including how to extract strings using nibtool.

• “Strings Files” shows you how to create string resource files and get the resulting strings in your code.

• “Internationalizing Other Resources” provides tips on how to localize programmatically-generated content using the current locale information.

• “Localizing Pathnames” describes the Mac OS X support for localized bundle and directory names and shows you how to support this feature in your application.

• “Notes For Localizers” provides tips for people who localize content in Mac OS X.

• “File Encodings and Fonts” provides legacy information related to file encodings in previous versions of Mac OS, along with information about how to support those encodings in Mac OS X. It also describes some issues surrounding the use of fonts with different file encodings.

See Also

The bundle mechanism of Mac OS X plays a prominent role in supporting localized versions of an application. For more information about bundles and how they store localized resources, see Bundle Programming Guide.

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