Introduction

Before Internationalization

Suppose you've written a program that displays three messages, as follows:

System.out.println("Hello.");
System.out.println("How are you?");
System.out.println("Goodbye.");

You've decided that this program needs to display these same messages for people living in France and Germany. Unfortunately, your programming staff is not multi-lingual, so you'll need help translating the messages into French and German. Since the translators aren't programmers, you'll have to move the messages out of the source code and into text files that can be edited by the translators. Also, the program must be flexible enough so that it can display the messages in other languages, but right now no one knows what those languages will be. Therefore, the end-user must be able to specify their language at run time.

It looks like the program needs to be internationalized.

Introduction