Making Your Application Localizable
Localization is the process of adapting an application to a specific language, culture, and region. By planning ahead and making localization relatively painless, you'll ensure that your product is ready for international markets in the future. This section provides a brief overview of what you need to do to make it easy to localize your application. For the complete account of writing software that is compatible with Macintosh computers throughout the world, see Inside Macintosh: Text and Guide to Macintosh Software Localization.The key to easy localization is to store region-dependent information used by your application as resources (rather than within the application's code). Text seen by the user can then be translated without modifying the code. In addition, storing such information in resources means that your application can be adapted for a different area of the world simply by substituting the appropriate resources. Make sure that at least the following kinds of information are stored in resources:
When you create resources for your applications, remember the following key points:
- all text, including special characters and delimiters
- menus and keyboard equivalents for menu commands (if available)
- character, word, phrase, and text translation tables
- address formats, including zip codes and telephone numbers
- text needs room to grow (up, down, and sideways)
- translated text is often 50 percent larger than the U.S. English text
- diacritical marks, widely used outside the United States, may extend up to the ascent line
- some system fonts contain characters that extend to both the ascent and descent lines
- text location within a window should be easy to change