Chapter 16. Internationalization

If a plug-in developer’s audience is to be wider than a single country, such as the United States, then internationalization becomes an important aspect of development. Both Eclipse and the underlying Java runtime environments provide APIs for separating language and UI-related issues from the code. This chapter covers the techniques involved and provides examples of internationalizing the example plug-in.

Every application—and an Eclipse plug-in is no exception—includes dozens of human-readable strings that present themselves to the user in windows, dialogs, and menus. Isolating those strings so that they can be localized (translated) for different countries and languages is the most important step in internationalizing your plug-in.