The Solaris 7 product includes full Unicode 2.0 support, as defined in ISO-10646, for selected locales. Solaris 7 is a major release for Sun's international markets. It includes a number of new features for Asian customers and significantly expands language support for Eastern Europe and the Baltic States.
Unicode 2.0 supported through English and Korean locales.
Six new UTF-8 Unicode locales added: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Europe. (Europe returns the Euro as the default currency symbol).
UTF-8 locales support multiple input and output for all European locales as well as Korean, Japanese, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese. Enhancements have been made to the en_US.UTF-8 locale so that users can input and display text from different writing scripts such as Japanese, Thai, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean and Russian. Users can easily switch between the scripts without having to change or install a new locale.
Codeset conversion utilities have been enhanced for better data interoperability in the Russian locale.
Expanded language coverage
Euro currency. All foreign exchange, banking, and finance industries in the European community are converting from using their local currencies to using the Euro. Solaris 7 software has added support for the Euro currency with six new user locales.
CDE applications included in Asian versions to support Complex Text Layout (CTL) locales. Complex text support has been integrated for complex text layout languages, which require special text pre-processing to handle bidirectional, composite, and context-sensitive text.
Solaris 7 software supports Motif 2.1, which includes five new Motif widgets. Motif 2.1 is MT-safe and includes software for CTL locale support.
zh.GBK locale for Simplified Chinese in the People's Republic of China. This feature supports GBK Character Set, a superset of GB2312 which is used in the zh locale.
The English and European translations for the Solaris 7 operating environment have been combined on a single CD. As a result, more locale selections are available during installation of this combined CD than were seen previously.
The Desktop Font Downloader allows users to download, remove, re-encode and convert fonts, check status, and perform other administrative tasks on a PostScipt printer.
Internationalization is the process of making software portable between languages or regions, while localization is the process of adapting software for specific languages or regions. International software can be developed using interfaces that modify program behavior at run time in accordance with specific cultural requirements. Localization involves establishing on-line information to support a language or region, called a locale.
Unlike software that must be completely rewritten before it can work with different native languages and customs, internationalized software does not require rewriting. It can be ported from one locale to another without change. The Solaris system is internationalized, providing the infrastructure and interfaces you need to create internationalized software. and Chapter 4, Overview of en_US.UTF-8 Locale Support describe what facilities are available and how to use them.
Internationalization and localization are different procedures.
Internationalization is the process of making software that is independent of any locale. It can then be easily adapted to specific locales.
The following localized products are available in the Solaris 7 operating environment:
An internationalized application's executable image is portable between languages and regions. To internationalize software, you should:
Use the interfaces described in this book to create software whose environment can be modified dynamically without the necessity of recompiling the software.
Separate software into executable and messages. The messages include all printable and displayable messages that the user sees. Keep the message strings in a message catalog.
Message strings are translated for a language and a region. A locale includes the message strings and methods to specify sorting.
Locales are not the same as a language. A language may contain various regions. For example, French is spoken in France and Canada, but each country has different ways of displaying monetary and time information.
To use a localized version of a product, the user sets the environment variables (described in "Locale Categories "). The product then displays the user messages in their translated form. , , Date, time, currency and other information is formatted and displayed according to locale-specific conventions.
A locale may be composed of both a base language and the country of use. This allows for specific differences by country such as currency units notation.
The key concept for application programs is that of a program's locale. The locale is an explicit model and definition of a native-language environment. The notion of a locale is explicitly defined and included in the library definitions of the ANSII C Language standard.
The locale consists of a number of categories for which there is language-dependent formatting or other specifications. A program's locale defines its codesets, date and time formatting conventions, monetary conventions, decimal formatting conventions, and collation (sort) order.
A locale name contains language, territory, and possibly codeset, although territory is dropped when not needed. Codeset is usually assumed. For example, German is de, an abbreviation for Deutsch, while Swiss German is de_CH, CH being an abbreviation for Confederation Helvetica.
More than one locale may be associated with a particular language. This allows for regional differences such as currency notation. For example, an English-speaking user in the United States can select the en_US locale (English for the United States). An English-speaking user in Great Britain can select en_GB (English for Great Britain).
Generally the locale name is specified by the LANG environment variable. Locale categories are subordinate to LANG, but may be set separately, in which case they override LANG. If LC_ALL is set, it overrides not only LANG, but all the separate locale categories as well.
A full Solaris locale has all of the listed functions and the localized system messages in that language. The German de locale is a full locale. A German language user sees all system messages in German.
Partial locales have the listed functions but they don't provide localized messages. For example, the Russian ru locale can process input, output, sorting, and so on, but it does not have localized messages in Russian. For this reason it is a partial locale.
Some partial locales do use non-English messages because there may be a full locale with the localized messages. For example, the de_AT is a partial locale for Austria. Austrians speaks German but use a different currency. The Austrian locale is a subset of the German de locale. It displays messages in German and currency in Austrian shillings instead of German marks.
Different cultures use different conventions for writing the date, the time, numbers, currency, delimiting words and phrases, and quoting material.
A locale defines the behavior of a program at runtime according to a language or cultural region's conventions. Throughout the system, a locale determines the behavior of the following:
Encoding and processing of text data
Identifying the language and encoding of resource files and their text values
Rendering and layout of text strings
Interchanging text that is used for interclient text communication
Encoding and decoding for interclient text communication
Selecting the input method (that is, which codeset is generated) and the processing of text data
Font and icon files that are culturally specific
Actions and file types
User Interface Definition (UID) files
Date and time formats
Numeric formats
Monetary formats
Collation order
Format for informative and diagnostic messages and interactive responses
The Solaris environment separates language and culture-dependent information from the application and saves it outside the application.
By separating the language and culture-dependent information from the application, the developer does not need to translate, rewrite, or recompile the application for each market. The only requirement to enter a new market is to localize the external information to the local language and customs.
The locale categories are as follows:
Specifies date and time formats, including month names, days of the week, and common full and abbreviated representations.
Specifies monetary formats. Few SunOS system commands or library routines actually use this category.
Specifies the decimal separator (or radix character) and the thousands separator.
Specifies the sorting order for a locale and the string conversions required to attain this ordering.
Specifies the language in which the localized messages are written.
Specifies the language engine which provides information about language rendering. Language rendering (or text rendering) consists of text shaping and directionality.
The localization of a product should be done in consultation with native users in that target language or region. Certain styles and information styles and formats may seem perfectly obvious and universal to the developer, but to the user, these look either awkward, wrong, or even offensive. The following pages describe the elements that the Solaris operating environment allows you to control and specify so that you can successfully internationalize your product.
Table 1-1 shows some of the ways to write 11:59 P.M.
Table 1-1 International Time Formats
Locale |
Format |
---|---|
Canadian |
23:59 |
Finnish |
23.59 |
German |
23.59 Uhr |
Norwegian |
Kl 23.59 |
U.K. |
11.59 PM |
Thai |
13:10 PM |
Time is represented by both a 12-hour clock and a 24-hour clock. The hour and minute separator can be either a colon ( : ) or a period (.).
Time zone splits occur between and within countries. Although a time zone can be described in terms of how many hours it is ahead of, or behind, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), this number is not always an integer. For example, Newfoundland is in a time zone that is half an hour different from the adjacent time zone.
Daylight Savings Time (DST) starts and ends on different dates that can vary from country to country.
Table 1-2 shows some of the date formats used around the world. Note that even within a country, there may be variations.
Table 1-2 International Date Formats
Locale |
Convention |
Example |
---|---|---|
Canadian (English and French) |
yyyy-mm-dd |
1998-08-13 |
Danish |
dd/mm/yy |
13/08/98 |
Finnish |
dd.mm.yyyy |
13.08.1998 |
French |
dd/mm/yy |
13/08/98 |
German |
dd.mm.yy |
13.08.98 |
Italian |
dd.mm.yy |
13.08.98 |
Norwegian |
dd.mm.yy |
13.08.98 |
Spanish |
dd-mm-yy |
13-08-98 |
Swedish |
yyyy-mm-dd |
1998-08-13 |
UK-English |
dd/mm/yy |
13/08/98 |
US-English |
mm-dd-yy |
08-13-98 |
Thai |
dd/mm/yyyy |
10/12/2539 |
Great Britain and the United States are two of the few places in the world that use a period to indicate the decimal place. Many other countries use a comma instead. The decimal separator is also called the radix character. Likewise, while the U.K. and U.S. use a comma to separate thousands groups, many other countries use a period instead, and some countries separate thousands groups with a thin space. Table 1-3 shows some commonly used numeric formats.
Table 1-3 International Numeric Conventions
Locale |
Large Number |
---|---|
Canadian (English and French) |
4 294 967 295,00 |
Danish |
4.294.967.295,00 |
Finnish |
4.294.967.295,00 |
French |
4.294.967.295,00 |
German |
4 294 967 295,00 |
Italian |
4.294.967.295,00 |
Norwegian |
4.294.967.295,00 |
Spanish |
4.294.967.295,00 |
Swedish |
4.294.967.295,00 |
UK-English |
4,294,967,295.00 |
US-English |
4,294,967,295.00 |
Thai |
4,294,967,295.00 |
Data files containing locale-specific formats will be misinterpreted when transferred to a system in a different locale. For example, a file containing numbers in a French format is not useful to a U.K.-specific program.
There are no particular locale conventions that specify how to separate numbers in a list. They are sometimes comma-delimited in the UK and the U.S., but often spaces and semicolons are used.
Currency units and presentation order vary greatly around the world. Table 1-4 shows monetary formats in some countries.
Table 1-4 International Monetary Conventions
Locale |
Currency |
Example |
---|---|---|
Canadian (English) |
Dollar ($) |
$1 234.56 |
Canadian (French) |
Dollar ($) |
1 234.56$ |
Danish |
Kroner (kr) |
kr.1.234,56 |
Finnish |
Markka (mk) |
1.234 mk |
French |
Franc (F) |
F1.234,56 |
German |
Deutsche Mark (DM) |
1,234.56DM |
Italian |
Lira (L) |
L1.234,56 |
Japanese |
41,234 Yen |
|
Norwegian |
Krone (kr) |
kr 1.234,56 |
Spanish |
Peseta (Pts) |
1.234,56Pts |
Swedish |
Krona (Kr) |
1234.56KR |
UK-English |
Pound |
31,234.56 pounds |
US-English |
Dollar ($) |
$1,234.56 |
Thai |
Baht |
2539 Baht |
Local and international symbols for currency can differ. For example, the designation for the French franc is "F" in France but this is often written as FRF' internationally to distinguish it from other francs, such as the Swiss franc or the Polynesian franc.
Be aware also that a converted currency amount may take up more or less space than the original amount. To illustrate: $1,000 can become L1.307.000.
In English, words are separated by a space character. In languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Thai, however, there is often no delimiter between words.
The order of words in phrases and sentences varies between languages. For instance, the order of the words "cat" and "black" in "a black cat" is reversed in the equivalent Spanish phrase, "uno gato negro." And in French, the negatives "ne" and "pas" surround the word they negate, as in the phrase "I do not speak," which in French is "Je ne parle pas."
Sorting order for particular characters is not the same in all languages. For example, the character "ö" sorts with the ordinary "o" in Germany, but sorts separately in Sweden, where it is the last letter of the alphabet. In some languages, characters have weight to determine the priority of the character sequences. For example, in Thai, the Thai dictionary defines sorting through the sequences of characters which have different weights.
While the English alphabet contains only 26 characters, some languages contain many more characters. Japanese, for example, can contain over 40,000 characters; Chinese even more.
The alphabets of most western European countries are similar to the standard 26-character alphabet used in English-speaking countries, but there are often some additional basic characters, some marked (or accented) characters, and some ligatures.
Japanese text is composed of three different scripts mixed together: Kanji ideographs derived from Chinese, and two phonetic scripts (or syllabaries), Hiragana and Katakana.
Although each character in Hiragana has an equivalent in Katakana, Hiragana is the most common script, with cursive rather than block-like letter forms. Kanji characters are used to write root words. Katakana is mostly used to represent "foreign" words--words "imported" from languages other than Japanese.
There are tens of thousands of Kanji characters, but the number commonly used has been declining steadily over the years. Now only about 3500 are frequently used, although the average Japanese writer has a vocabulary of about 2000 Kanji characters. Nonetheless, computer systems must support more than 7000 because that is what the Japan Industry Standard (JIS) requires. In addition, there are about 170 Hiragana and Katakana characters. On average 55% of Japanese text is Hiragana, 35% Kanji, and 10% Katakana. Arabic numerals and Roman letters are also present in Japanese text.
Although it is possible to avoid the use of Kanji completely, most Japanese readers find text containing Kanji easier to understand.
Korean text can be written using a phonetic writing system called Hangul. Hangul has more than 11,000 characters, which are composed by 19 consonants, 21 vowels and optional 27 consonants. About 3,000 Hangul characters from the whole Hangul characters are usually used in Korean computer systems. Korean also uses ideographs based on the set invented in China, called Hanja. Korean text requires over 6,000 Hanja characters. Hanja is used mostly to avoid confusion when Hangul would be ambiguous. Hangul characters are formed by combining consonants and vowels. After combining them together, they can compose one syllable, which is a Hangul character. Hangul characters are often arranged in a square, so that the group takes up the same space as a Hanja character. Arabic numerals, Roman letters and special symbol characters are also present in Korean text.
A Thai character can be defined as a column position on a display screen with four display cells. Each column position can have up to three characters. The composition of a display cell is based on the Thai character's classification. Some Thai characters can be composed with another character's classification. If they can be composed together, both characters will be in the same cell. Otherwise, they will be in separate cells.
Chinese usually consists entirely of characters from the ideographic script called Hanzi. In the People's Republic of China (PRC) there are about 7000 commonly used Hanzi characters in GB2312 (zh locale) and more than 20,000 characters in the GBK (zh.GBK) locale. In Taiwan, current standards require more than 13000 characters; 6000 others have been recently standardized but are considered rare.
If a character is not a root character, it usually consists of two or more parts, two being most common. In two-part characters, one part generally represents meaning, and the other represents pronunciation. Occasionally both parts represent meaning. The radical is the most important element, and characters are traditionally arranged by radical, of which there are several hundred. The same sound can be represented by many different characters, which are not interchangeable in usage. The same character can even have different sounds.
Some characters are more appropriate than others in a given context--the appropriate one is distinguished phonetically by the use of tones. By contrast, spoken Japanese and Korean lack tones.
There are several phonetic systems for representing Chinese. In the People's Republic of China the most common is pinyin, which uses roman characters and is widely employed in the West for place names such as Beijing. The Wade-Giles system is an older phonetic system, formerly used for place names such as Peking. In Taiwan zhuyin (or bopomofo), a phonetic alphabet with unique letter forms, is often used instead.
Commercial applications, particularly those that deal with people's names, need to consider the impact of codeset expansion. Many Chinese people have names containing characters that do not exist in any standard codeset. Space needs to be provided in unassigned codesets to deal with this issue.
Not all characters on the U.S. keyboard appear on other keyboards. Similarly, other keyboards often contain many characters not visible on the U.S. keyboard. However, on Sparc machines, the Compose key can be used to produce any character in the ISO Latin-1 codeset on any keyboard that supports it.
The Compose key can be used with English or European locales, but not with Korean, Chinese, or Japanese locales.
Both the position and the type of punctuation symbols can vary between languages. In Spanish, "¿" and "¡" appear at the beginnings of sentences, while in Finnish colons ( : ) can occur inside words.
Commonly used symbols in one culture often have no meaning in another culture. For example, because the common U.S. rural mailbox does not exist in other countries, it would not make a universal email icon.
While most countries now use the metric system of measurement, the United States, parts of Canada, and the Great Britain (albeit unofficially) still use the imperial system. The symbols for feet (`) and inches (") are not understood in all countries.
The spelling of adjectives, articles, and nouns are gender-dependent in some languages. In French, for example, "un petit gamin" and "une petite gamine" both mean "a cute kid." The first expression, however, refers to a boy, and the second expression to a girl. Also, neuter objects in English ("a computer" for example) have gender in other languages ("un ordinateur" is a masculine noun in French).
Mr., Miss, Mrs., and Ms. are common titles in the U.S. but are not used in many other countries. The order in which addresses are written is different too.
Address formats differ from country to country. In many countries, the postal code includes letters as well as numbers.
The order of writing addresses differs from country to country. The order of writing first name and last name is also different.
Within each country a small number of paper sizes are commonly used, normally with one of those sizes being much more common than the others. Most countries follow ISO Standard 216 "Writing paper and certain classes of printed matter--Trimmed sizes--A and B series."
Internationalized applications should not make assumptions about the page sizes available to them. The Solaris system provides no support for tracking output page size; this is the responsibility of the application program. Table 1-5 shows Common International Page Sizes.
Table 1-5 Common International Page Sizes
Paper Type |
Dimensions |
Countries |
---|---|---|
ISO A4 |
21.0 cm by 29.7 cm |
Everywhere except U.S. |
ISO A5 |
14.8 cm by 21.0 cm |
Everywhere except U.S. |
JIS B4 |
25.9 cm by 36.65 cm |
Japan |
JIS B5 |
18.36 cm by 25.9 cm |
Japan |
U.S. Letter |
8.5 inch by 11 inches |
U.S. and Canada |
U.S. Legal |
8.5 inch by 14 inches |
U.S. and Canada |
The book Creating Worldwide Software, 2nd edition, by Bill Tuthill and David Smallberg (SunSoft Press, 1997), is a guide to localizing for the Solaris platform. The book is recommended for developers who work with the Solaris system See "Related Books and Sites" for a full citation.
The book Creating Worldwide Software is for developers and managers who develop products for the worldwide UNIX platform, especially for the Sun Solaris system.
Chapter 1, "Winning in Global Markets," briefly shows the market potential of internationalizing your products and defines the steps of internationalization and localization.
Chapter 2, "Understanding Linguistic and Cultural Differences," shows through examples how an item will appear in various cultures.
Chapter 3, "Encoding Character Sets," describes how to encode character sets in any language.
Chapter 4, "Establishing Your Locale Environment," looks at how a user selects a locale. It leads you through the steps of creating a specific locale for your product, including formats for time, date, money, and so on.
Chapter 5, "Messaging for Program Translation," explains how to prepare your product to handle localized messages. It discusses how to create and install your translated message catalogs.
Chapter 6, "Displaying Localized Text," discusses font, user interface, and printing issues.
Chapter 7, "Handling Language Input," discusses the various input methods for various languages.
Chapter 8, "Working with CDE," explains the CDE environment and your localization.
Chapter 9, "Motif Programming," discusses how to write applications under Motif and CDE.
Chapter 10, "X11 Programming," discusses internationalization with X11.
Chapter 11, "Communicating Network Data," discusses issues in sharing and distributing data across networks.
Chapter 12, "Writing International Documentation," includes guidelines for writing manuals and documentation to be translated.
Chapter 13, "Product Localization," discusses business issues.
Chapter 14, "Standards Organizations," is a summary of the international standards organizations.
Chapter 15, "Internationalization Checklist," has a checklist for internationalization.
Appendix A, "Languages, Territories, and Locale Names," lists the standard names for languages, locales, and so on.
Appendix B, "Locale Summaries and Keyboard Layouts," lists many locale-specific information and keyboard layouts.
Appendix C, "OpenWindows and DevGuide," explains how internationalization works with OpenWindows.
Appendix D, "XView Programming," discusses internationalization with XView.
Appendix E, "OLIT Programming," discusses internationalization with OPEN LOOK Intrinsics Toolkit (OLIT).
Appendix F, "Example Program," offers a complete source code for an internationalized Motif application.
Appendix G, "Annotated Bibliography," is a summary of additional suggested books.
Appendix H, "Glossary," is a list of key terms.