National language support

Because many languages exist in the world today, it's important to design applications that are language friendly; that is, user friendly for all languages. Building an application that has its user interface only in English inhibits use of that application by people who don't know English.

If you are creating applications that are language friendly, VA Smalltalk helps you in several areas:

Externalization of text

The user interface for your application might have text that the user sees. This text includes labels in your windows and messages that are displayed. VA Smalltalk can extract this text and place it into an editable file so it can be translated easily.

Country information support

Your operating system has specific country information. This includes date separators and currency symbols like the French franc and the German mark. VA Smalltalk uses the country settings from the operating system and the settings you select in settings views to display this data correctly. To see what country settings your system uses, display Locale current.

Double-byte support

Some languages include characters that are stored in two bytes instead of a single byte. Double-byte characters are primarily found in Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. VA Smalltalk provides classes and methods that work with double-byte strings. To see whether your system uses single-byte or double-byte strings, display Locale current preferredStringClass.

Here is a good guideline to follow: don't place text or characters that can't be translated in your source code. Use the tools described in this chapter to place them in files where they are easily accessible for translation, and have your application retrieve the text or characters at run time.