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Global markets are lucrative. Selling your applications around the world will help you generate revenue and increase market share. To be successful in the international marketplace, your applications must support local languages and data formatting conventions. Your customers will expect nothing less. For example, Americans expect English messages, dates in mm/dd/yy format, and currency expressed in dollars ($). Germans want to see their messages in German, dates in dd.mm.yyyy format, and, currency expressed in Deutsche Marks (DM).Software companies used to customize programs for different countries the hard way. In the first version of a product, they hardcoded culturally-dependent data such as text and dates. Whenever they wanted to support a new language, they had to make a copy of the source code, change all the hardcoded elements, and recompile. To release a new version, they had to update the different source files and ship a new set of executables. Not only was this process tedious, it was error-prone and costly. Fortunately, new techniques emerged to help develop global software: internationalization and localization.
Internationalization
This section describes the advantages and properties of internationalization. When you internationalize a program, you make it easily portable between languages and regions.Localization
After a program has been internationalized, it can be adapted, or localized, for a specific language or region. This section briefly describes the localization process.Culturally Sensitive Data
Culturally sensitive data is the reason we have to internationalize and localize our programs. This section discusses some of the different kinds of culturally sensitive data you might encounter.
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