Application localization
Localization is the process of customizing an application for use in various languages, countries, and cultures. provides an internationalized environment for building, testing, and localizing applications.
A locale describes the language, country setting, and other characteristics of the local system's user interface. You can create a application to run in a particular locale, or you can make your application simultaneously available in multiple locales.
The development environment enables you to localize all aspects of the user interface:
- Language used for labels, messages, help text, reports, menus, and any other words that are part of a form's user interface
- Separator symbol for decimal numbers that include a fraction
- Separator symbol for numbers greater than 999
- Format for dates and times
- Layout, colors, and images
You can store each localized version of a form as a view. Therefore, the same application can provide separate user interfaces (views) for British English, Australian English, Mexican Spanish, and Peruvian Spanish. Although the user interface is tailored to each user's locale, the data and workflow are the same for all users. Therefore, you need to agree on the language for the data before the application is made available.
The localization features are automatic for the user and easy to implement for the application builder. To localize an application for a given locale, an administrator can create views only for that locale and add corresponding messages to the message catalog. Utilities are available to assist with this work. See Localizing-an-application-to-other-languages.