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Tien Soon's Tech Blog

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  Internationalization and Localization

  Posted: December 21st, 2006, 8:57am MYT by Law Tien Soon

  I prefer to use a computerized system in English interface, but another colleague from Taiwan prefers Simplified Chinese, and there’re Spanish users who prefer to use the system in Spanish language.
  
  
  
  If you’re working in a MNC, and currently evaluating a business information system solution, the above scenario is what you must address. Can the system be personalized across each individual in terms of language? We call this internationalization, or i18n.
  
  
  
  If a business system is designed for enterprise environment in mind, it should be able to support internationalization with great scalability. So to say, each user can choose their preferred language, and additional languages can also be easily added into the system without any architectural revamp.
  
  
  
  What about localization?
  
  
  
  Localization is referring to the support for localized environment, in various aspects such as time zone, currency unit, date format, and decimal format.
  
  
  
  Just a simple example, 13th of January 2007 can be written as 13/01/2007 (dd/MM/yyyy), 01/13/2007 (MM/dd/yyyy), 13-Jan-2007 (dd-MMM-yyyy), Jan 13, 2007 (MMM dd, yyyy), and a lot more other formats. Each country and organization might have a difference of preference in date format. Can the system be easily configured anytime to activate a particular date format? The same concept applies to other localization factors like decimal format.
  
  
  
  Time zone is a tricky issue. Some of the business systems are actually storing any kind of date values in the data store, according to the time zone where the server is physically sitting, and not the place where this system is used.
  
  
  
  Let’s imagine you have an executive information system, hosted at a server located in Central America. However, the actual users of the system are actually residing in Malaysia. So, if the system is stamping all the business transactions in Central America time zone GMT-06:00, isn’t it inconvenient for Malaysian users to interpret the data?
  
  
  
  Just two simple words – internationalization, localization – but presenting one of the most critical and technically challenging architectural factors.