Chapter 12. Localization
This chapter covers
- Lift’s localization strategies
- Configuring the locale calculator
- Utilizing Java localization infrastructure
In this age of globalization and the apparent consolidation of many cultures, it may surprise you to know that there are still between 6,500 and 10,000 different languages spoken in the world today. The exact figure isn’t known, but you can be sure that our world has a large amount of linguistic diversity. Traditionally, this has caused a large number of problems for software engineers because these different languages often have cultural differences that are specific to a certain locale.
Take something as simple as a greeting in two English-speaking countries, like Great Britain and Australia; the former would likely use Good afternoon and the latter would likely use Good’ay. Strictly speaking, both countries are English-speaking, but cultural differences lead to colloquialisms becoming commonplace and a subsequent divergence from the original dialect. As you might imagine, there’s an infinite amount of variation in presentation styles and content, such as when comparing Latin-based text to Arabic or Hebrew, which are both written right-to-left, and not left-to-right. All these things and more combine to make writing software for the international market subtly difficult.