Multilingual User Interface on Windows 2000
Bill Hall - SimulTrans, L.L.C.
Intended Audience: |
Manager, Software Engineer, Internationalization and Localization Engineer, QA Engineer |
Session Level: |
Intermediate |
Microsoft Windows 2000 was designed with multilanguage usage in mind.
For example, the English version is capable of handling simultaneous
input and output in languages ranging from Arabic to Vietnamese
including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indic, and European languages in
between. In addition, the user interface language can be easily
changed without installing a new version of the product. The current
release of the Mulituser Interface (MUI) offers twenty-three versions
including European, Bidirectional, and Far East languages, all of
which can be installed and selected as required at user level
granularity. Such versatility is especially useful to those that are
involved in Internationalization, Localization, and International QA
as well as those that share the same machine but require different
language settings. In this presentation, we look at MUI support from
both the user and programmer's view. We explain the difference
between system language and user language and show how an application
can enumerate and query for available UI languages and load an
appropriate user interface via multilingual resources or language
DLL's.
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