LionChain International

Key characteristics for Internationalized programs (I18N):

• The same executable file can still be run globally, even if the localized portion is added.
• Enable textual elements, such as status messages and GUI component labels, to be stored outside the source code and retrieved dynamically rather than hard-coded in the program.
• Support new languages without recompilation.
• Culture-related data (such as dates and currency symbols) would correspond to the matching formats for the End User’s region and language displayed. Therefore, the internationalized program is beneficial to handle localization.

What is DBCS Support?

DBCS stands for Double Byte Character Set, it means a character set in which all characters (including all control characters) are encoded in two bytes. In CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) computing, the term DBCS traditionally refers to a character set where each graphic character is encoded in two bytes.

DBCS support means internationalizing software by writing software for East Asian markets using older technology with code pages.

Unicode supports all the major languages in East Asia

Unlike many other code pages with compatibility limitation, Unicode supports all the major languages in East Asia. It is generally easier to enable and maintain software that uses Unicode. DBCS (non-Unicode) enablement is usually only desired when much older operating systems or applications do not support Unicode.

Cultural and Technical Issues

When developing software and websites for international audience, there are many considerations and modifications to be made.

• Locale:
  The program may need to be modified to recognize which country's local conventions should be used.
• Time and Date Displays:
  International time and dates are displayed differently around the world. In general, Americans indicate dates by 'month-day-year;' Europeans use 'day-month-year,' and Asian cultures use 'year-month-day.' The program needs to be designed to accommodate these variations.
• Measurement Systems:
  The program should be written to accommodate both imperial and metric systems.
• Formatting Numbers and Currency:
  Many languages use commas instead of decimals points and a period or a space instead of a comma to indicate the thousands place. Symbols for currency differ between countries as well. The software needs to be designed with these modifications in mind.

These are just a sampling of some of the considerations that must be made when programming for an international audience. Other things, such as bi-directional text, the use of icons, colors etc., need to be evaluated as well.

Sorting and Searching Issues

Sorting in English is not a problem because sorting mechanisms are written with the assumption that the alphabet and words within the sentence are divided by spaces. Text in Far Eastern languages is represented by symbols and characters. Because of this, sorting characters is more difficult than sorting words. There are also different sort sequences on a country by country basis. For example, European languages raise issues when accented characters are used. Searching can also cause problems.

Character Sets

Asian languages do not exclusively use alphabetical systems; they also use pictorial representations of words called glyphs or ideographs. Problems can arise because many programs were written to support characters in a single byte, while Asian characters may require two or more bytes per character. For this reason, products that need to be translated into Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, need to be double-byte enabled or written in Unicode compostable. Your codes may need to be evaluated and changed to support these languages.