To familiarise students with the requirements for and understanding of technical issues in relation to world-ready digital content/software and involving different frameworks, including Microsoft Win 32, .NET, ASP, HTML, SQL, XML and Java.

Preparing software to be independent of language, locale and market: writing systems - character sets, writing direction, word delimiters, hyphenation and line breaks, punctuation, formatting differences - time formats, date formats, calendars, numbers currency, measurements, other cultural differences, titles and addresses, images, symbols, sounds, colours, product names, paper sizes, keyboard differences. Understanding internationalisation issues; designing and developing world-ready software; internationalisation principles; examine and assess approaches to undertaking software internationalisation. Programming process; understand the problem, plan the logic, design the solution, code the program, translate the program into machine language, test the program, syntax and semantics. Multilingual User Interface issues; basic UI issues, space restrictions, different types of devices and displays. Internationalisation requirements: the internationalisation decision making process (pro and contra); locale-dependent internationalisation; platform-dependent internationalisation; levels of internationalisation - for world-readiness and for localisation. Internationalisation for new locales; font design, dealing with scripts, sorting; character encoding, cultural conventions, input/output methods. Internationalisation for specific development frameworks and platforms; Windows-based, Macintosh, Java, Web. Transcending locale: the current concept of locale; limitations in a global computing environment; beyond locale: personalisation. Testing for Internationalisation: internationalisation check-lists, specification walk-through, code walk-through, multilingual user tests, localisability tests.

On successful completion of this module, students should be able to: 1. Examine and assess approaches, proposed in literature, to undertaking software internationalisation. 2. Given source code for an application, identify the aspects relating to language, culture, local practices and local conventions that need to be addressed in order to internationalise this application. 3. Identify how software development environments support addressing language, culture, local practices and local conventions issues. 4. Given source code for an application, internationalise it using the functionality provided by a development environment.

1. Differentiate between the variants of software internationalisation. 2. Appreciate how an Application Program Interface (API) addresses language, culture, local practices and local conventions issues.

N/A