Internationalization

Focus on developing your product, while we prepare it for international markets.

SDL's internationalization team allows you to focus on developing your product, while we prepare it for international markets.

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SDL Services Solution Brief

SDL's Internationalization Services are customized to meet your needs. Whether you require an internationalization analysis or need us to completely internationalize your product, SDL has the skills and resources in-house.

Here are some of the issues we look for when evaluating and internationalizing your product.

Cultural and Technical Issues

When creating software and websites for use around the world, there are many considerations and modifications to be made.

Locales: The program may need to be modified to recognize which country's local conventions should be used.
Time and Date Displays: International time and dates are displayed differently around the world. In general, Americans indicate dates by 'month-day-year;' Europeans use 'day-month-year,' and Asian cultures use 'year-month-day.' The program needs to be designed to accommodate these variations.
Measurement Systems: The program should be written to accommodate both imperial and metric systems.
Formatting Numbers and Currency: Many languages use commas instead of decimals points and a period or a space instead of a comma to indicate the thousands place. Symbols for currency differ between countries as well. The software needs to be designed with these modifications in mind.

These are just a sampling of some of the considerations that must be made when programming for an international audience. Other things, such as bi-directional text, the use of icons, colors etc., need to be evaluated as well. SDL's Internationalization team can help you evaluate and make recommendations concerning these issues.

Sorting and Searching

Sorting in English is not a problem because sorting mechanisms are written with the assumption that the alphabet and words within the sentence are divided by spaces. Text in Far Eastern languages is represented by symbols and characters. Because of this, sorting characters is more difficult than sorting words. There are also different sort sequences on a country by country basis. For example, European languages raise issues when accented characters are used. Searching can also cause problems. SDL International is very familiar with these issues and is able to make modifications to solve them.

Character Sets

Asian languages do not exclusively use alphabetical systems; they also use pictorial representations of words called glyphs or ideographs. Problems can arise because many programs were written to support characters in a single byte, while Asian characters may require two or more bytes per character. For this reason, products that need to be translated into Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, need to be double-byte enabled or written in Unicode. SDL has an expert team who can evaluate and make changes to your code to support these languages.