1. INTERNATIONALIZATION

2. Objective – Reducing time and effort required to make a software product support multiple languages.
Language is a tool used for communication- focuses on human languages ( such as Japanese, English , French )
Not on computer languages ( java, C and C++ )
For the same language, the spoken usage, word usage, and grammar could vary from country to country. ( characters and alphabets remain the same)
Ex: US English : Color UK English : Colour

3. Character set
Standards - used to represent characters of different languages in the computer.
ASCII- It is a byte representation for characters ( 8 bits ) used in computer.
It uses 7 bits to represent all characters that are used in computers.
Using this method ( 2 power 7 = 128 ) characters are represented in binary.
Later it uses 8 characters ( 2 power 8 =256 )
Extended ASCII- ENGLISH like ASCII characters which have special meaning in European and western languages.
Double byte character set
It uses two bytes for each character ( Chinese and Japanese )

4. Unicode provides a unique number to every character no matter what platform, program or languages.
It uses fixed width – all software applications and platforms are moving towards Unicode.
Unicode
ASCII or DBCS are sufficient to encode all the characters of a single language.
They are not sufficient to represent all the characters of all the languages in the world.

5. LOCALE
Commercial software not only needs to remember the languages but also the country in which it is spoken.
Two countries speaking the same language