Multilingual User Interface on Windows 2000
Bill Hall - MLM Associates, Inc.
Intended Audience: |
Software Engineers, Internationalization and Localization Engineers, QA Engineers, Managers |
Session Level: |
Intermediate |
Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional and Server were designed with multilanguage
usage in mind. For example, the English language version is capable of handling
input and display of numerous languages including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese,
Korean, Indic, Thai, Hebrew, and all the major European languages including
Turkish. In addition, the user interface language can be changed independently
of text input and display without installing a localized version of the product.
The Multilanguage User Interface (MUI) provides this functionality; the current
release offers twenty-three languages along with English. European, bi-
directional, and Far East languages can be installed and selected as required at
user level granularity. Such versatility is especially useful to companies
having multilingual needs but who wish to simplify installation and maintenance
as well as support multiple users speaking different languages on the same
desktop or server. Additionally, the MUI is extremely useful to those that are
involved in shipping products worldwide and are therefore involved in
internationalization programming, localization, and language quality assurance.
In this presentation, we look at MUI support from the user, programmer and
network administrator viewpoints. We also examine MUI installation and
directory structure, explain the difference between the system and user
language, and show how an application can enumerate and query for available UI
languages for both installation and run-time use. Demonstrations in contrasting
user interface languages accompany the presentation.
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