The Problem Domain: what are we up against?

The characteristics of different languages and writing systems, from Greek to Hebrew, Russian to Japanese, Swedish to Mongolian are presented visually. Differences in cultural conventions are also highlighted.

This chapter tells us WHAT issues programmers, webmasters and managers should be concerned with (and often are not aware of).

Internationalization and Localization. Translation and what translators need. Levels of internationalization complexity. Globalization over time: the maintenance requirement. ROI: the benefits of preparing for translation.

This chapter tells us WHY we should be concerned with the issues presented above, i.e. WHY we should prepare for translation.

An animated graphical model that illustrates the three basic tasks of internationalization: resource externalization, cultural generalization and preparation of the localization kit. Each of the three tasks is explored in more detail.

This chapter shows us HOW, in general terms applicable to both software and Web sites, to prepare for translation.

Types of projects; parallelism and sim-ship. Setting up a team & managing the process. Staffing, roles and responsibilities, the importance of requirements. How a solid development process enables a simple strategy to reduce risk.

Character sets and locales. Unicode, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 and the four normalization forms. GB18030 and its implications for doing business in China. Supporting input methods. Fonts and font issues. Sorting and searching. Distributed applications (client-server, Web) & multi-threading.

This chapter contains several illustrated examples that show what it all means, as well as more extensive checklists of the major do's and don'ts.

Internationalization testing and localization testing. Staffing and techniques. Regression tests and pseudo-translation. Platform coverage and bug workflow.