Chapter 8: Internationalization

Having to retrofit internationalization or scalability is a pain, certainly. The only bigger pain is not needing to, because your initial version was too big and rigid to evolve into something users wanted.
— Paul Graham

Overview

In today's global business environment, seldom does an application live in isolation. This is true both in terms of heterogeneous software living alongside an application and in terms of the culture and language preferences of its users. In the not-so-distant past, people were willing to put up with — and indeed came to expect — programs that communicated using just a single language and with a bias toward a single culture. This decision was often left to the preference of the management and developers responsible for creating the software. And furthermore, in many cases this meant that this communication medium was U.S. English.

Mainstream technology has now progressed to a point where this is not acceptable in business and home environments. Applications are now expected to respect the language and cultural preference of their users, at least those targeted at international markets. The process of doing so is called internationalization and is the topic of this chapter. An internationalized application delivers UI, text, and data content in a culture- and language-aware manner.

Internationalizing your application can lead to substantial competitive advantage for a company, open up new markets that would have otherwise have been excluded by a single-language approach, and, in other cases, might simply fulfill a requirement so that global corporations can share the same software infrastructure across worldwide satellite offices. If none of these are concerns for you, then the simple fact that internationalization provides a way to create more familiar and usable interfaces for your users might be justification enough. Just to be entirely clear, however: Internationalization is a costly endeavor and should not be undertaken without understanding your users' scenarios and the need for it.