A Quick Example

Before Internationalization

Suppose we've written a program that displays three messages, as follows:

System.out.println("Hello.");
System.out.println("How are we?");
System.out.println("Goodbye.");

We've decided that this program needs to display these same messages for people living in France and Germany. Unfortunately, our programming staff is not multi-lingual, so we'll have to get help translating the messages into French and German. Since our translators aren't programmers, we'll have to move the messages out of the source code and into text files that can be edited by the translators. Also, we want the program to be flexible enough so that it can display the messages in other languages, but right now we aren't sure what those languages will be. Therefore, we want the end-user to specify their language at runtime.

It looks like the program needs to be internationalized.

A Quick Example