All About Internationalization
Internationalization for Managers (AM)
More on Internationalization for Programmers (PM)

9am - 5pm : Friday, May 27, 2005

Welcome and Introduction

• Who's who?
• What do we want from this workshop?

The Problem Domain: what are we up against?

• What is language
  • communication
  • language & the origin of man
  • languages of the world
• What changes from one language to another?
  • words, grammar, characters
  • numbers, punctuation
  • writing systems
  • scripts and language
• Asian (CJK) scripts
  • ideographic vs phonetic
  • horizontal & vertical text direction
  • ruby annotation
  • ideographic input
• Bidirectional scripts (Arabic, Hebrew, ...)
  • context-dependent shapes
  • ligatures & diacritics
  • bidirectional numerics and embedding
  • summary of text flow directions
• Language-related processing
  • Wrapping & hyphenation
  • Justification
  • sorting
• Cultural aspects
  • numbers & currency
  • date, time, calendars
  • paper sizes & phone numbers
  • payment methods & color

Globalization Concepts and ROI

• Globalization, Internationalization, Localization, Translation
• Translation and what translators need
• Globalization over time: the maintenance requirement
• Levels of internationalization complexity
• A globalization scenario
• ROI
  • globalization ROI
  • internationalization ROI

A Graphical Model of Internationalization

• Resource Externalization
  • six steps of externalization
  • benefits
• Cultural Generalization
  • internationalization libraries
  • single executable model & benefits
  • other internationalization architectures
• Localization Kit Preparation
  • prepare for translation
  • prepare for building & testing

Managing Internationalization

• Types of projects & sim-ship
• Setting up a team
  • organizational structures
  • roles & responsibilities
  • staffing
  • training
• Managing the process
  • requirements
  • assessment & analysis
  • implementation
  • strategy: baseline & compare
  • the moving target problem

Development Concepts

• Character sets
  • History of character sets
  • ASCII to Windows code page 1252
  • MBCS: multi-byte character sets
  • Unicode & UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32
  • Unicode normalization forms
  • GB18030 and its implications for doing business in China
• Locales
  • Definition
  • Usage
  • Locale-dependent functions
• Supporting input methods
• Fonts and font issues
• Sorting and searching
• Distributed applications (client-server, Web)
• Multi-threading

Development Do's and Don'ts

Testing Internationalization

• Internationalization testing and localization testing
• Basic internationalization testing
  • Regression testing
  • testing resource externalization
  • testing cultural generalization
  • testing the localization kit
• Advanced testing issues
  • staffing
  • platform coverage
  • bug workflow
• Test suite globalization
  • internationalization of the test suite
  • localization of the test suite
  • test the test suite