Why bother writing multilingual applications?
There are several reasons for writing multilingual applications. In addition to the obvious reason – to increase revenue and distribution of software by entering into international markets (this is, after all, the era of the World-Wide Web) – there are two other convincing arguments: • Ship a single binary. Shipping one core functionality binary to all platforms (and for all different language versions) reduces the hassle and cost of development significantly, eliminating the need for compilation conditions and maintenance of separate source code for each language. Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Office 2000, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 are all single binaries – the same core gdi32.dll, for example, ships on the English US, Japanese and Arabic versions of Windows 2000. A potential update to this module in future Service Packs can be applied to all languages with no additional engineering effort. • Avoid being your own competitor. Delaying the shipment of different language ve
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