Current State of Internationalization

Previously, the industry supplied many variants of internationalization from proprietary functions to the new set of standard functions published by X/Open. Also, there have been different levels of enabling, such as simple ASCII support, Latin/European support, Asian multibyte support, and Arabic/Hebrew bidirectional support.

The interfaces defined within the X/Open specification are capable of supporting a large set of languages and territories, including:

Furthermore, the goal of the Common Desktop Environment is that localization of these technologies (translation of messages and documentation and other adaptation for local needs) be done in a consistent way, so that a supported user anywhere in the world will find the same common localized environment from vendor to vendor. End users and administrators can expect a consistent set of localization features that provide a complete application environment for support of global software.