Localization is the process of including assets to support multiple
locales. A locale is the combination of a language and a country
code. For example, en_US refers to the English language as spoken
in the United States, and fr_FR refers to the French language as
spoken in France. To localize an application for these locales,
you would provide two sets of assets: one for the en_US locale and
one for the fr_FR locale.
Locales can share languages. For example, en_US and en_GB (Great
Britain) are different locales. In this case, both locales use the
English language, but the country code indicates that they are different
locales, and might therefore use different assets. For example,
an application in the en_US locale might spell the word "color",
whereas the word would be "colour" in the en_GB locale. Also, units of
currency would be represented in dollars or pounds, depending on
the locale, and the format of dates and times might also be different.
You can also provide a set of assets for a language without specifying
a country code. For example, you can provide en assets for the English
language and provide additional assets for the en_US locale, specific
to U.S. English.
Localization goes beyond just translating strings used in your
application. It can also include any type of asset such as audio
files, images, and videos.
Choosing a locale
To determine which locale your content
or application uses, you can use one of the following methods:
-
flash.globalization package — Use the locale-aware
classes in the flash.globalization package to retrieve the default
locale for the user based on the operating system and user preferences.
This is the preferred approach for applications that will run on
the Flash Player 10.1 or later or AIR 2.0 or later runtimes. See
Determining the locale
for more information.
-
User prompt — You can start the application in some default
locale, and then ask the user to choose their preferred locale.
-
(AIR only) Capabilities.languages
— The
Capabilities.languages
property
lists an array of languages available on the user’s preferred languages,
as set through the operating system. The strings contain language
tags (and script and region information, where applicable) defined
by RFC4646 (
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4646.txt
).
The strings use hyphens as a delimiter (for example,
"en-US"
or
"ja-JP"
).
The first entry in the returned array has the same primary language
ID as the language property. For example, if
languages[0]
is
set to
"en-US"
, then the
language
property
is set to
"en".
However, if the language property
is set to
"xu"
(specifying an unknown language),
the first element in the
languages
array is different.
-
Capabilities.language
— The
Capabilities.language
property
provides the user interface language code of the operating system. However,
this property is limited to 20 known languages. And on English systems,
this property returns only the language code, not the country code. For
these reasons, it is better to use the first element in the
Capabilities.languages
array.
Localizing Flex content
Adobe Flex includes
a framework for localizing Flex content. This framework includes
the Locale, ResourceBundle, and ResourceManagerImpl classes, as
well as the IResourceBundle, IResourceManagerImpl interfaces.
A Flex localization
library containing utility classes for sorting application locales
is available on Google Code (http://code.google.com/p/as3localelib/).
Localizing Flash content
Adobe Flash Professional
includes a Locale class in the ActionScript 3.0 components. The
Locale class allows you to control how a SWF file displays multilanguage
text. The Flash Strings panel allows you to use string IDs instead
of string literals in dynamic text fields. This facility allows
you to create a SWF file that displays text loaded from a language-specific
XML file. For information on using the Locale class, see the
ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe
Flash Platform
.
Localizing AIR applications
The AIR SDK provides an HTML Localization Framework (contained
in an AIRLocalizer.js file). This framework includes APIs that assist
in working with multiple locales in an HTML-based application. An
ActionScript library for sorting locales is provided at http://code.google.com/p/as3localelib/.
Localizing dates, times, and currencies
The way applications present dates, times, and currencies varies
greatly for each locale. For example, the U.S. standard for representing
dates is month/day/year, whereas the European standard for representing
dates is day/month/year.
You can write code to format dates, times, and currencies. For
example, the following code converts a Date object into month/day/year
format or day/month/year format. if the
locale
variable
(representing the locale) is set to
"en_US"
, the
function returns month/day/year format. The example converts a Date
object into day/month/year format for all other locales:
function convertDate(date)
{
if (locale == "en_US")
{
return (date.getMonth() + 1) + "/" + date.getDate() + "/" + date.getFullYear();
}
else
{
return date.getDate() + "/" + (date.getMonth() + 1) + "/" + date.getFullYear();
}
}
ADOBE FLEX
The Flex framework includes controls
for formatting dates, times, and currencies. These controls include
the DateFormatter and CurrencyFormatter controls.
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