Internationalization

There are three terms around Internationalization that are often used interchangably, however they are distinctions. Here's a good definition.

• "Localization is the process of adapting the text and applications of a product or service to enable its acceptability for a particular cultural or linguistic market."
• "Internationalization s planning and implementing products and services so that they can easily be localized for specific languages and cultures."
• "Globalization is an approach to business strategy that aims to address all of the logistical and organizational challenges an enterprise faces as it expands its supporting content, assets and message across cultures and markets to new clients."

 The Basics

• Start by reading "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" twice. I'll wait here.
• The ASP.NET QuickStart Tutorials have an excellent section on Internationalization (also called i18n because there's 18 characters between the i and the n in Internationalization)
• A Simple Example
• Resource Expressions
• Local and Global Resources
• Implicit Expressions to Local Resources
• Explicit Expressions to Local Resources
• Programmatic Access to Global Resources
• Localizing Static Content
• Storing Language Preferences
• The main .NET internationalization page is also a great starting point and includes a large collection of links to more content and whitepapers.
• Internationalize Your ASP.NET Sites - A nice long tutorial from DevX on I18n. A bit old, but good historical context.
• GetText-based i18n for ASP.NET - An alternative, open source, library that lets you handle internationalization the way Django, Rails, PHP, Java, and pretty much everybody else does.

Videos

• How Do I: Create a Multi-Lingual Site with Localization? - Learn how to create culture-aware and locale-specific web content with no additional code. Use the Resource Editor to create page-level and application-level resources.
• How Do I: Localize an ASP.NET AJAX Application?  - In this video we start with an overview of the localization capabilities of the standard ASP.NET framework, and then look at the localization features of the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions.

Podcasts

• Hanselminutes Podcast 26 - Globalization/Internationalization with .NET - Scott chats about preparing your .NET application for the global marketplace and Carl leads us into a discussion about character encoding.

Enjoy!

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