Content-type: text/html
l10n_intro, l10n, locales, LOCPATH - Introduction to localization (L10N)
Localization refers to the process of establishing information within a computer system specific to each supported language, cultural data, and coded character set (codeset) combination. Each such combination gives rise to the definition of one locale. The abbreviation L10N is often used to stand for localization as there are 10 characters between the beginning "L" and the ending "N" of that word.
See i18n_intro(5) for introductory information about internationalization and how to use system commands to set a locale. For information about creating locales, refer to localedef(1), charmap(4), and locale(4). For information about creating locales and writing applications that use locales, refer to Writing Software for the International Market.
The current release of Tru64 UNIX supports the following languages, each of which is discussed separately in its own reference page:
Catalan Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) Czech Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hungarian Italian Japanese Korean Lithuanian Polish Portuguese Russian Slovak Slovene Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish
For some of the languages, more than one codeset and country or territory are supported. Hence, multiple locales are supported for certain languages. The following list names and describes all the supported locales. For information about the character encoding used by a particular locale, refer to the reference page for the codeset specified in the last part of the locale name or, for those that end in .UTF-8, to Unicode(5). Catalan locales for Spain Czech locale for Czech Republic Danish locales for Denmark German locales for Switzerland German locales for Germany Greek locales for Greece English locales for Great Britain English locale that includes the euro character (uses UTF-8 encoding)
For the zh_CN.dechanzi locale, the @pinyin, @radical, and @stroke variants are available for sorting by pinyin, radical, and stroke, respectively. For the zh_TW.big5, zh_TW.dechanyu, and zh_TW.eucTW locales, the @chuyin, @radical, and @stroke variants are available for sorting by chuyin, radical, and stroke, respectively. These variant locale names (those including the @collation_modifier suffix) are available for assignment to the LC_COLLATE variable.
The locales whose names end in .UTF-8, support file code and internal process code according to the ISO 10646 and Unicode standards. The universal.UTF-8 locale is also available (for use by applications rather than end users) and supports the complete set of characters in the Universal Character Set (UCS). These locales are also the only ones that include the euro (C=) monetary sign in the coded character set. The *.UTF-8@euro variants provide more specific euro support by defining the local currency sign to be the euro character and the international currency sign to be EUR. (See the euro(5) reference page for more information about the euro character and how it is supported.)
For some locales that use traditional UNIX and proprietary codesets, there are also corresponding @ucs4 locale variants available for use by applications that require internal process code to be in UCS-4 format while file code remains in the format of the traditional UNIX or proprietary codeset. Refer to Unicode(5) for more information about encoding formats of the @ucs4 and .UTF-8 locales.
You can use the
-a
flag with the
locale
command to list all the locales available on the system. Note that the POSIX
(or C) locale is always available because it must exist on all systems that
conform to The Open Group's UNIX specifications. The POSIX locale is the default
locale when locale variables are not set.
The following system environment variables can be set (usually only by installed applications or by programmers who are testing applications or converters under development) to override the default search path for certain kinds of localized files: Specifies the search path for locales and codeset converters. Note that this environment variable is not defined by current industry standards. For more information, refer to the iconv_intro(5), iconv_open(3), and setlocale(3) reference pages.
Partial source files, along with an associated Makefile, are available for many locales in the /usr/lib/nls/loc/src directory. By editing one of these source files and using the Makefile to rebuild the locale (make locale_name), you can customize one or more of the following features: The format of affirmative and negative responses (LC_MESSAGES section) Rules and symbols for formatting monetary numeric information (LC_MONETARY section) Rules and symbols for formatting nonmonetary numeric information (LC_NUMERIC section) Rules and symbols for formatting date and time information (LC_TIME section)
The LC_CTYPE and LC_COLLATE sections of these locale sources are not customizable. This means that you cannot use one of these sources to change how characters are classified or collated. By implication, this also means that you cannot add a new character to a locale that does not already support it. For example, you cannot add the European monetary character (euro) to a locale that does not already support that character. However, you can edit the LC_MONETARY section to define a string identifier for euro by using characters that the locale does support. For example, you could replace the existing monetary symbol with EUR.
For more information on a locale source file, see locale(4).
Customized versions of locales that are provided with the operating system are not preserved when the operating system is reinstalled, even when an update installation procedure is used. Therefore, it is important to back up files for customized locales and their sources before reinstalling the operating system. After the reinstallation is complete, you will need to restore your customized locales to the system. If the newly installed sources have revisions when compared to the the old sources, it might be preferable to apply your customizations to the newly installed sources and rebuild your customized locales.
Commands: locale(1), localedef(1)
Functions: catopen(3)
Others: Catalan(5), Chinese(5), Czech(5), dechanyu(5), dechanzi(5), deckanji(5), deckorean(5), eucJP(5), eucKR(5), eucTW(5), euro(5), French(5), German(5), Greek(5), Hebrew(5), Hungarian(5), i18n_intro(5), i18n_printing(5), iconv_intro(5), iso2022(5), iso2022jp(5), iso8859-1(5), iso8859-2(5), iso8859-4(5), iso8859-5(5), iso8859-7(5), iso8859-8(5), iso8859-9(5), Italian(5), Japanese(5), jiskanji(5), Korean(5), Lithuanian(5), Polish(5), Russian(5), sbig5(5), sdeckanji(5), shiftjis(5), Slovak(5), Slovene(5), Spanish(5), Swedish(5), TACTIS(5), telecode(5) Thai(5), Turkish(5), Unicode(5)
Writing Software for the International Market