Re: Multilingual table design questions

Jonathan Leffler wrote:
> JOG wrote:
> > Jonathan Leffler wrote:
> >> This is the approach I'd use, with a fall-back rule for dealing with
> >> missing translations (such as: use American if there is no French).
> >
> > <shudders/>. I think you mean English.
>
> I wish I could say that, but my view is coloured by my favourite
> misspellings - those that I suffer from each day. I originally wrote
> "English", then did the necessary translation.

There is, of course, no language called "American." What they speak in the United States is called "English." There are international standards for specifying country and language; the pair together is called a "locale." Locales are specified by a 5 character string; the standard locale for the United States is "en_US". This is composed of a lower-case, two-letter country code as defined by ISO-639, an underscore, and an upper-case, two-letter language code as defined by ISO-3166. The Javadoc for java.util.Locale is quite a useful source of information, even if you're not doing Java programming.

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/Locale.html

Marshall Received on Tue Feb 21 2006 - 04:40:18 CET