Internationalization

Internationalization is the act of making a site accessible and scalable to a wide host of languages. In 2005, the W3C released the i18n Specification, which illustrates a set of best practices for internationalizing a site.

The W3C established the i18n Standard, which stands for the 18 letters in between i and n in the word Internationalization.

Charset

"The term charset, is short for “character set”. Charsets are identifiers used to describe a series of universal characters used in web and internet protocols such as HTML and Microsoft Windows. Universal characters are used in many languages for encoding and for designating a font format for pages or to digitally represent text. A charset table or tables list the type of charsets and its standard. Unicode, ascii and iso are types of charsets that reference text or universal symbols or characters used in various languages and meta tags.

The ASCII (American Standard Code for Computer Information Interchange) charset is one of the most common used charsets in Windows-based operating systems. Unicode can be used for almost all worldwide languages including Latin, European Languages, Arabic and even Japanese and Chinese. The letters en are sometimes used in file content or in a header as part of a charset.

Users of charsets can usually note several differences in various types of charsets as one version may differ quite notably from another. Various Authoring Tools may be used to identify related charsets so the user can tell what type of languages they are dealing with when programming or working with source documents. In some systems, a server will change character encoding to the default charset used. Charsets are not usually an issue unless they are not set right then they become quite important as they may present issues in the way that a document or web page is displayed."

• Setting i18n compatible MobileOK Charsets: http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.en.php

Japanese

• Basics of Japanese multi-byte encodings: http://www.php.net/manual/en/mbstring.ja-basic.php
• AJAX i18n: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/gmurray71/archive/2006/03/ajax_i18n_with.html

Tools

• W3C i18n Checker: http://qa-dev.w3.org/i18n-checker/
• Character Conversion tool: http://rishida.net/tools/conversion/

Resources

• i18n Languages dropdown/SQL: http://bcmoney-mobiletv.com/blog/2009/02/16/i18n-languages-html-drop-down-box/#more-18
• List of All Countries in JSON: http://dzone.com/articles/list-of-all-countries-in-json
• Internationalizing Web Services: http://www.inter-locale.com/whitepaper/ws-i18na.html
• W3C I18n technique index: http://www.w3.org/International/technique-index
• W3C - Understanding the New Language Tags: http://www.w3.org/International/articles/bcp47/

PHP

• PHP i18n: http://php-flp.sourceforge.net/
• PHP Cookbook -- O'Reily Media -- Internationalization and Localization with PHP: http://onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2002/11/28/php_i18n.html
• Class -- I18N class: http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2537.html
• Class -- Internationalization and Localization: http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2444.html

JavaScript

• Detect foreign language support using JavaScript: http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-5069931.html
• Displaying characters cross-browser (including legacy IE): http://www.javascripter.net/faq/accentedcharacters.htm
• Internationalize/Localize your app with jQuery i18n/l10n libs: http://dzone.com/articles/localize-your-app-with-jqueryi18n

JAVA

• i18nchecker: https://github.com/phamernik/i18nchecker
• JAVA i18n Tutorial (by SUN): http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/intro/
• JAVA - Creating a Locale: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/locale/create.html
• Enterprise JAVA Web Applications (i18n section): http://java.sun.com/blueprints/guidelines/designing_enterprise_applications_2e/i18n/i18n4.html
• Internationalization Code Example: http://www.roseindia.net/tutorials/I18N/internationalison-code.shtml
• Sun Java Forum - Internationalization (I18N): http://forums.sun.com/forum.jspa?forumID=16

i18n :: C/C++

• ICU - International Components for Unicode (ICU4C and ICU4J java versions as well): http://site.icu-project.org/

Tutorials

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!): https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/
• Java Internationalization tutorial: http://tutorials.jenkov.com/java-internationalization/index.html
• Java - Unicode on the Windows command line: https://illegalargumentexception.blogspot.com/2009/04/java-unicode-on-windows-command-line.html
• Setting the HTTP charset parameter: https://www.w3.org/International/articles/http-charset/index
• What does “Content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8” really mean?: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9254891/what-does-content-type-application-json-charset-utf-8-really-mean

External Links

• wikipedia: Internationalization and localization
• wikipedia:List of ISO 639-1 codes
• Tutorial: Character sets & encodings in XHTML, HTML and CSS: http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/tutorial-char-enc/
• RFC 3066 -- Tags for the Identification of Languages: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt
• W3C answer -- 2 or 3-letter language codes?: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-2or3.en.php
• RFC 4646 -- Tags for Identifying Languages: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4646.txt
• DRUPAL i18n example -- Language switcher in a drop down selection: http://drupal.org/node/261059
• Mozilla Internationalization & Localization Guidelines: http://www.mozilla.org/docs/refList/i18n/
• Building Accessible Websites: http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/AppendixB.html
• ISO 3166 Country Codes: http://www.maxmind.com/app/iso3166
• Setting the HTTP charset parameter: http://www.w3.org/International/O-HTTP-charset
• Java Internationalization -- An Overview: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/IntlIntro/
• Why the #AskObama Tweet was Garbled on Screen: Know your UTF-8, Unicode, ASCII and ANSI Decoding Mr. President: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/WhyTheAskObamaTweetWasGarbledOnScreenKnowYourUTF8UnicodeASCIIAndANSIDecodingMrPresident.aspx

See Also

L10N | Language | UTF | Text