Objective Reducing time and effort required to make

§ Objective – Reducing time and effort required to make a software product support multiple languages. § Language is a tool used for communication- focuses on human languages ( such as Japanese, English , French ) § Not on computer languages ( java, C and C++ ) § For the same language, the spoken usage, word usage, and grammar could vary from country to country. ( characters and alphabets remain the same) § Ex: US English : Color UK English : Colour

§ Standards - used to represent characters of different languages in the computer. § ASCII- It is a byte representation for characters ( 8 bits ) used in computer. § It uses 7 bits to represent all characters that are used in computers. § Using this method ( 2 power 7 = 128 ) characters are represented in binary. § Later it uses 8 characters ( 2 power 8 =256 ) § Extended ASCII- ENGLISH like ASCII characters which have special meaning in European and western languages. Double byte character set § It uses two bytes for each character ( Chinese and Japanese )

Unicode ASCII or DBCS are sufficient to encode all the characters of a single language. They are not sufficient to represent all the characters of all the languages in the world. § Unicode provides a unique number to every character no matter what platform, program or languages. § It uses fixed width – all software applications and platforms are moving towards Unicode.

§ Commercial software not only needs to remember the languages but also the country in which it is spoken. § Two countries speaking the same language