Locale customization has gained increasing importance as a result of the expanding multilingual market and evolving customer needs. It often becomes necessary to adapt cultural and linguistic conventions of existing locales to meet specific customer requirements. As an example, customized character sets are often needed to support special symbols, vendor-specific characters, or historical and rare characters, especially in Asian countries with large character repertoires. Similarly, linguistic sort definitions are also frequently customized to accommodate the particular requirements of a given language or even for different contexts within the same language. To achieve the desired locale behavior, a systematic tool which allows for efficient and flexible locale customization will provide great value to end-customers and software vendors alike.

This paper describes the specific tasks and the common issues in locale customization. It shows some of the techniques that can be used to facilitate the customization process and ensure conformance to the Unicode Standard. It will illustrate the benefits of the introduced techniques with the Oracle Locale Builder which is a convenient utility for manipulating locale-specific data. The Oracle Locale Builder provides an easy-to-use graphical user interface through which one can easily view, customize, or create the various locale data definitions without requiring any knowledge of the specific data formats used. In particular, it enables the creation of customized character sets and customizable multilingual linguistic sorts. With the Oracle Locale Builder, users can build their own customized locales that tailor to their specific needs.