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Chapter 7
Internationalization
Today it is often a requirement that an application be able to “speak” many languages. A technique for developing applications that support multiple languages and data formats without having to rewrite the programming logic is called internationalization. Internationalization is abbreviated i18n because the word starts with an i and ends with an n, and there are 18 characters between the first i and the last n. In addition, localization is the technique of adapting an internationalized application to support a specific locale. A locale is a specific geographical, political, or cultural region. An operation that takes a locale into consideration is said to be locale-sensitive. For example, displaying a date is locale-sensitive because the date must be in the format used by the country or region of the user. The 15th day of November 2006 is written as 11/15/2006 in the US, but written as 15/11/2006 in Australia. Localization is abbreviated l10n because the word starts with an l and ends with an n and there are 10 letters between the l and the n.
In this chapter we look at new i18n and l10n features in Java 6.