Alpha TransTech’s Internationalization Services are customized to meet your needs. Whether you require an internationalization analysis or need us to completely internationalize your products, we have the skills and resources ready.

Here are some of the issues we take care of during that process:

* When creating websites for use around the world, there are many considerations and modifications to be made:

• Locales: The program may need to be modified to recognize which country's local conventions should be used.

• Time and Date Displays: International time and dates are displayed differently around the world. In general, Americans indicate dates by month-day-year. Europeans use day-month-year, and Asian cultures use year-month-day. It needs to be designed to accommodate these variations.

• Measurement Systems: They should be written to accommodate both imperial and metric systems.

• Formatting Numbers and Currency: Many languages use commas instead of decimals points and a period or a space instead of a comma to indicate the thousands place. Symbols for currency differ between countries, as well. The software needs to be designed with these modifications in mind.

These are just a sampling of some of the considerations that must be made when preparing for an international audience. Other things, such as bidirectional text, the use of icons, and colors need to be evaluated, as well. Alpha TransTech’s internationalization team can help you evaluate and make recommendations concerning these issues.

* Sorting in English is not a problem because sorting mechanisms are written with the assumption that the alphabet and words within the sentence are divided by spaces. Text in Far Eastern languages is represented by symbols and characters. Because of this, sorting characters is more difficult than sorting words. There are also different sort sequences on a country-by-country basis. For example, European languages raise issues when accented characters are used. Searching can also cause problems. Alpha TransTech is very familiar with these issues and is able to make modifications to solve them.

* Asian languages do not exclusively use alphabetical systems; they also use pictorial representations of words called glyphs or ideographs. Problems can arise because many programs were written to support characters in a single byte, while Asian characters may require two or more bytes per character. For this reason, products that need to be translated into Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, need to be double-byte enabled or written in Unicode.

Alpha TransTech has an expert team who can evaluate and make changes to your code to support these languages.