41.1. Globalization and Localization

An important step in the planning process of any project is to identify what locales it will be deployed in. In this context, locale doesn't refer to a specific geographic area so much as a set of conventions: not just the language, but its dialect (U.S. English vs. British English); its measurement system (Metric/SI or Imperial); its currency, date, and numeric conventions (€7,00 vs. $7.00); and so on. Essentially, a locale is the set of regional rules surrounding written material. As you can imagine, supporting more than one locale means making some changes in the way you present text and numbers. Knowing the locales ahead of time, or at least knowing the fact that you need to support more than one locale, lets you write your user interface code with localization in mind and saves you from going back and ripping apart perfectly good, tested code later.

Now that I've dispensed with that obligatory warning, I'll return to those terms. Globalization, also called internationalization, entails writing code that's easy to localize. It's that planning ahead part I just mentioned. Localization is the process of adapting it to a specific locale. For example, this code has not been internationalized; it's not easily localized: