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1.3 Aspects in Native Language Support

For a totally multi-lingual distribution, there are many things to translate beyond output messages.

As we already stressed, translation is only one aspect of locales. Other internationalization aspects are system services and are handled in GNU libc. There are many attributes that are needed to define a country’s cultural conventions. These attributes include beside the country’s native language, the formatting of the date and time, the representation of numbers, the symbols for currency, etc. These local rules are termed the country’s locale. The locale represents the knowledge needed to support the country’s native attributes.

There are a few major areas which may vary between countries and hence, define what a locale must describe. The following list helps putting multi-lingual messages into the proper context of other tasks related to locales. See the GNU libc manual for details.

Characters and Codesets

The codeset most commonly used through out the USA and most English speaking parts of the world is the ASCII codeset. However, there are many characters needed by various locales that are not found within this codeset. The 8-bit ISO 8859-1 code set has most of the special characters needed to handle the major European languages. However, in many cases, choosing ISO 8859-1 is nevertheless not adequate: it doesn’t even handle the major European currency. Hence each locale will need to specify which codeset they need to use and will need to have the appropriate character handling routines to cope with the codeset.

Currency

The symbols used vary from country to country as does the position used by the symbol. Software needs to be able to transparently display currency figures in the native mode for each locale.

Dates

The format of date varies between locales. For example, Christmas day in 1994 is written as 12/25/94 in the USA and as 25/12/94 in Australia. Other countries might use ISO 8601 dates, etc.

Time of the day may be noted as hh:mm, hh.mm, or otherwise. Some locales require time to be specified in 24-hour mode rather than as AM or PM. Further, the nature and yearly extent of the Daylight Saving correction vary widely between countries.

Numbers

Numbers can be represented differently in different locales. For example, the following numbers are all written correctly for their respective locales:

12,345.67       English
12.345,67       German
 12345,67       French
1,2345.67       Asia

Some programs could go further and use different unit systems, like English units or Metric units, or even take into account variants about how numbers are spelled in full.

Messages

The most obvious area is the language support within a locale. This is where GNU gettext provides the means for developers and users to easily change the language that the software uses to communicate to the user.

These areas of cultural conventions are called locale categories. It is an unfortunate term; locale aspects or locale feature categories would be a better term, because each “locale category” describes an area or task that requires localization. The concrete data that describes the cultural conventions for such an area and for a particular culture is also called a locale category. In this sense, a locale is composed of several locale categories: the locale category describing the codeset, the locale category describing the formatting of numbers, the locale category containing the translated messages, and so on.

Components of locale outside of message handling are standardized in the ISO C standard and the POSIX:2001 standard (also known as the SUSV3 specification). GNU libc fully implements this, and most other modern systems provide a more or less reasonable support for at least some of the missing components.


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