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l10n_intro(5) File Formats Manual l10n_intro(5) NAME l10n_intro, l10n, locales, LOCPATH - Introduction to localization (L10N) DESCRIPTION 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 internationaliza- tion and how to use system commands to set a locale. For information about creating locales, refer to localedef(1), charmap(4), and lo- cale(4). For information about creating locales and writing applica- tions that use locales, refer to Writing Software for the International Market. The current release of DIGITAL UNIX supports the following languages, each of which is discussed separately in its own reference page: Catalan Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) Czech Finnish French Ger- man 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 terri- tory 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 partic- ular locale, refer to the reference page for the codeset specified in the last part of the locale name or, for those that end in Unicode(5). Catalan locale 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 lo- cale for U.S. (uses the ISO8859-1 codeset) English locale for U.S. (uses cp850 character encoding) Use this locale with data that contains accented characters and that has been generated on a PC that uses the cp850 code page for character encoding. This character encoding is usually the default for the DOS and Windows operating systems in Europe. The en_US.ISO8859-1 and en_US.cp850 locales encode English charac- ters the same way but use different values for accented and other non-English characters in the Latin-1 character set. Spanish locales for Spain Finnish locales for Finland French lo- cales for Belgium French locale for Canada French locales for Switzerland French locales for France Hungarian locale for Hun- gary Icelandic locale for Iceland Italian locales for Italy He- brew locale for Israel Japanese locale for Japan (uses the Shift JIS codeset) Japanese locale for Japan (uses the DEC Kanji code- set) Japanese locale for Japan (uses the Japanese EUC codeset) Japanese locale for Japan (uses the Super DEC Kanji codeset) Ko- rean locale for Korea (uses the DEC Korean codeset) Korean lo- cale for Korea (uses the Korean EUC codeset) Lithuanian locale for Lithuania Dutch locales for Belgium Dutch locales for the Netherlands Norwegian locales for Norway Polish locale for Poland Portugese locales for Portugal Russian locale for Russia Slovak locale for Slovakia Slovene locale for Slovenia Swedish locales for Sweden Thai locale for Thailand Turkish locale for Turkey Simplified Chinese locale for the People's Republic of China (uses the DEC Hanzi codeset) Traditional Chinese locale for Hong Kong (uses the BIG-5 codeset) Traditional Chinese lo- cale for Hong Kong (uses the DEC Hanyu codeset) Simplified Chi- nese locale for Hong Kong (uses the DEC Hanzi codeset Tradi- tional Chinese locale for Hong Kong (uses the Taiwanese EUC codeset) Traditional Chinese locale for Taiwan (uses the BIG-5 codeset) Traditional Chinese locale for Taiwan (uses the DEC Hanyu codeset) Traditional Chinese locale for Taiwan (uses the Taiwanese EUC codeset) For the zh_CN.dechanzi locale, the @pinyin, @radical, and @stroke vari- ants are available for sorting by pinyin, radical, and stroke, respec- tively. 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 code and internal process code according to the ISO 10646 and Unicode standards. The universal.UTF-8 locale is also available to support the complete set of characters in the Univer- sal Character Set (UCS). These locales are also the only ones that sup- port the Euro (C=) monetary sign. (See the euro(5) reference page.) 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 pro- prietary codeset. Refer to Unicode(5) for more information about en- coding formats of the @ucs4 and locales. You can use the -a flag with the locale command to list all the locales available on the system. Note that the POSIX locale is always available because it must exist on all systems that conform to X/Open standards. The POSIX (or C) locale is the default locale when locale variables are not set. Environment Variables Related to Localization 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 lo- cales 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. Because the LOCPATH variable is not defined by standards, it is recommended for use only when testing locales or converters un- der development and not as a systemwide method for finding in- stalled converters or locales. When you set LOCPATH, make sure that the search path is valid for both locales and converters. Otherwise, application and system software will be able to find only locales or only converters in environments where both kinds of files are required. Specifies the search path for message catalogs, which contain translated text for programs. This vari- able is used primarily by the catopen() function. Refer to the catopen(3) reference page for detailed information on NLSPATH. Customizing Locales Partial source files, along with an associated Makefile, are available for many DIGITAL UNIX 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 follow- ing features: The format of affirmative and negative responses (LC_MES- SAGES section) Rules and symbols for formatting monetary numeric infor- mation (LC_MONETARY section) Rules and symbols for formatting nonmone- tary 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 mone- tary symbol to a locale that does not already support that character. In the case of the Euro monetary symbol, you can edit the LC_MONETARY section to define a string from characters that the locale does support to For more information on a locale source file, see locale(4). Caution 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 impor- tant to back up files for customized locales and their sources before reinstalling the operating system. After the reinstallation is com- plete, you will need to restore the customized locales to the system. SEE ALSO Commands: locale(1), localedef(1) Functions: catopen(3) Files: charmap(4), locale(4) 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), Ko- rean(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 l10n_intro(5)