Welcome and Introduction

• Who's who?
• What do we want from this workshop?

The Problem Domain: what are we up against?

• What is language
  • communication
  • language & the origin of man
  • languages of the world
• What changes from one language to another?
  • words, grammar, characters
  • numbers, punctuation
  • writing systems
• scripts and language
• Asian (CJK) scripts
  • ideographic vs phonetic
  • horizontal & vertical text direction
  • ruby annotation
  • ideographic input
• Bidirectional scripts (Arabic, Hebrew, ...)
  • context-dependent shapes
  • ligatures & diacritics
  • bidirectional numerics and embedding
  • summary of text flow directions
• Language-related processing
  • Wrapping & hyphenation
  • Justification
  • sorting
• Cultural aspects
  • numbers & currency
  • date, time, calendars
  • paper sizes & phone numbers
  • payment methods & color

Globalization Concepts and ROI

• Globalization, Internationalization, Localization, Translation
• Translation and what translators need
• Globalization over time: the maintenance requirement
• Levels of internationalization complexity
• A globalization scenario
• ROI
  • globalization ROI
  • internationalization ROI

A Graphical Model of Internationalization

A graphical model that illustrates the three basic tasks of internationalization:
resource externalization, cultural generalization and preparation of the localization kit.

• Resource Externalization
  • six steps of externalization
  • benefits
• Cultural Generalization
  • internationalization libraries
  • single executable model & benefits
  • other internationalization architectures
• Localization Kit Preparation
  • prepare for translation
  • prepare for building & testing

Managing Internationalization

• Types of projects & sim-ship
• Setting up a team
  • organizational structures
  • roles & responsibilities
  • staffing
  • training
• Managing the process
  • requirements
  • assessment & analysis
  • implementation
  • strategy: baseline & compare
  • the moving target problem

Development Concepts

• Character sets
  • History of character sets
  • ASCII to Windows code page 1252
  • MBCS: multi-byte character sets
  • Unicode & UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32
  • Unicode normalization forms
  • GB18030 and its implications for doing business in China
• Locales
  • Definition
  • Usage
  • Locale-dependent functions
• Supporting input methods
• Fonts and font issues
• Sorting and searching
• Distributed applications (client-server, Web)
• Multi-threading

Development Do's and Don'ts

This chapter contains several illustrated examples that show what it all means, as well as more extensive checklists of the major do's and don'ts.

Testing Internationalization

• Internationalization testing and localization testing
• Basic internationalization testing
  • Regression testing
  • testing resource externalization
  • testing cultural generalization
  • testing the localization kit
• Advanced testing issues
  • staffing
  • platform coverage
  • bug workflow
• Test suite globalization
  • internationalization of the test suite
  • localization of the test suite
  • test the test suite