Internationalization Issues Course Description

These materials are used for a one half day course that introduces participants to internationalization and localization. The materials first identify potential approaches to developing products for international markets. The development of a “generic”, internationalized base product is discussed along with the advantages and disadvantages of this approach. The slides also describe different character sets and languages that may need to be supported by the internationalized products. A variety of issues are identified that vary in international markets. This set of issues ranges from hard-code text, which ties your software to a specific language, to the need to be able to format times and dates for multiple international markets on to issues with fonts and peripherals. The course materials conclude with a list of “Internationalization Reminders.” This list reminds participants of the many product deliverables and company process that will need to be modified to satisfy the needs of international customers.

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Unicode Internationalization Issues Course Description

These materials are used for a one half day course that describes the use of Unicode in internationalized software products. The use of many different, non-Unicode character encodings is first described. Each of these many different character encodings support only a specific international market. The development of the Unicode universal character set and encodings allows easier transfers of data across international boundaries. This course describes the Unicode specification, activities of the Unicode Consortium and the relationship between Unicode and ISO 10646. This course also provides a detailed description of Unicode Character Encoding schemes and their advantages and disadvantages.  Unicode support on different operating systems, programming languages, scripting languages, RDBM’s, Internet browsers and markup languages is also described.

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C Internationalization Issues Course Description

These materials are used for a one half day course that provides software developers with the understanding needed to write internationalized C code. The course presents code samples to show how ISO C can be used to implement resolutions to internationalization issues. The course describes the use of C locales along with the choice of multi-byte and wide-character data types. Different types of internationalization issues are covered and the C capabilities to address each issue are described.

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C++ Internationalization Issues Course Description

These materials are used for a one half day course that provides software developers with the understanding needed to write internationalized C++ code. The course presents code samples to show how C++ can be used to implement resolutions to internationalization issues. Examples are presented for both ISO C++ and Visual C++. The course describes the use of C++ locale objects along with the choice of multi-byte and wide-character data types. Different types of internationalization issues are covered and the C++ capabilities to address each issue are described.

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International Components for Unicode (ICU) Internationalization Issues Course Description

These materials are used for a one half day course that provides software developers with the understanding needed to write internationalized code using International Components for Unicode (ICU). ICU is an open source project available from the ICU Project. ICU provides a wealth of internationalization capabilities for C, C++ and Java projects. The course presents code samples to show how ICU can be used to implement resolutions to internationalization issues. Examples are presented for both C and C++ programming languages. The course describes the use of ICU locale objects along with uChar wide-character data type. Different types of internationalization issues are covered and the ICU capabilities to address each issue are described.

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JAVA Internationalization Issues Course Description

These materials are used for a one half day course that provides software developers with the understanding needed to write internationalized Java code. The course presents code samples to show how Java can be used to implement resolutions to internationalization issues. The course describes the use of Java locale objects and the Java assumption that all character data uses Unicode characters. The use of InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter to perform character encoding conversion during I/O is also described. The course materials also explain how ResourceBundles can be used to manage information that is specific to each international market. Different types of internationalization issues are also identified along with the Java capabilities to address the issue.

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Internationalization and Localization Testing Issues Course Description

Like every other software feature, internationalization and localization features must be tested. These materials are used for a one half day course that identifies the additional activities and responsibilities of testing globalized software products. Additional testing phases are identified, and descriptions of the testing activities, staff and skills are described for each phase. Additional issues associated with internationalization testing are also identified. These include the ability of your defect tracking system and automated test tools to support international characters and the use of foreign test equipment during testing. The course also describes the management of an external localization organization to perform localization development and quality assurance of your product.

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Gentry L. Watson
Biography

Gentry L. Watson has over 25 years of experience developing and marketing software products to Global Markets. During that time, he spent over 12 years dealing with Software Internationalization (I18n) challenges. Although he has moved on to other activities, he continues to be interested in I18n issues and in promoting the development of fully Internationalized Software Products.

In order to accomplish this, he is offering Software Internationalization Course Materials to the public domain. These materials were developed and used to present Instructor-Led Technical Training Courses while Gentry was an Independent Consultant. He hopes that these materials will expand developers’ knowledge of world markets, show them some approaches to address those markets and hopefully get even more people looking outside their single, domestic marketplace.

Gentry lives in Colorado, in the U.S., and continues to study even more “Foreign” languages.

Gentry can be contacted at GWI18nServices@yahoo.com.