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1.2 Unicode and Internationalization

Internationalization is the process of changing the source code of a program so that it can meet the expectations of users in any culture, if culture specific data (translations, images etc.) are provided.

Use of Unicode is not strictly required for internationalization, but it makes internationalization much easier, because operations that need to look at specific characters (like hyphenation, spell checking, or the automatic conversion of double-quotes to opening and closing double-quote characters) don’t need to consider multiple possible encodings of the text.

Use of Unicode also enables multilingualization: the ability of having text in multiple languages present in the same document or even in the same line of text.

But use of Unicode is not everything. Internationalization usually consists of four features:

• Use of Unicode where needed for text processing. This is what this library is for.
• Use of message catalogs for messages shown to the user, This is what GNU gettext is about.
• Use of locale specific conventions for date and time formats, for numeric formatting, or for sorting of text. This can be done adequately with the POSIX APIs and the implementation of locales in the GNU C library.
• In graphical user interfaces, adapting the GUI to the default text direction of the current locale (see right-to-left languages).