Appendix A. Internationalization

In the book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes a world where people can place a "Babel fish" in their ears to instantly understand any language. While the real-life "Babel fish" at sites such as http://translate.google.com, do a fair job of automatic translations, an enterprise application intended for people speaking different languages still has to be translated at least in part by humans.

Even if you are only planning to run your application in one language, read this appendix to see how easy it is to internationalize your application. If you do the internationalization while developing the application, it's easy—if you have to do it later, it's hard.

Tip

Localization lingo

Internationalization means building your application so that it can be adapted to different languages and countries. People who work in this area often shorten a very long word to just i18n (eighteen characters in the middle of the word are removed).

Localization means actually preparing your application for a specific language and country. This will not only involve translating the user interface text, but also changing the date formats and making other changes for the specific country. This is sometimes abbreviated as L10n.