IBM i General Design Standards › Design Standards for Internationalization › General Principles

General Principles

The design aims for multinational support are to implement systems as follows:

• Different national language versions of the same system can be built without requiring programming changes.
• Different national language versions of the same system can coexist on the same machine with a minimum of redundancy among the application objects.

To achieve this, all Machine Readable Information (MRI) information seen by the user, for example, text for panels, report headings, menus, and Help text, must be held externally to the applications so that it can be translated into other national languages and the translations can be retained through subsequent upgrades to the software. In addition, you should parameterize and retrieve all factors that may vary between countries, such as date display format and currency symbol, at execution.

Ideally, you should be able to use just one set of HLL source, in conjunction with different sets of national language-specific text objects, to build different national language versions of the software.

IBM uses the term enabled to describe an application product that has been designed with translation in mind, even though it may not initially be translated. An enabled product (for example, OS/400) can then be implemented in any particular language easily, usually without a coding change. An application that is not enabled will require a retrofit in order to obtain a national language version.