Multilingual Support
Most of us cringe at the thought of supporting user groups that are in one of several possible locales. In many cases, however, once an application has been installed and localized, it's like any other single-locale application. The users that access the application are either all from the same locale or are from locales similar enough that the language and cultural differences are insignificant.
Multilingual applications, on the other hand, take internationalization to the next level by allowing users from different locales to access the same application. This means that the application has to be flexible enough to detect the user's locale and format everything based on that locale. This is much harder to do than just localizing an application.
The discussion of building multilingual applications is so large that it can't be covered satisfactorily in this book. For the remainder of this chapter, we'll stick with just the everyday internationalization problems that you'll face, and not focus on multilingual support.
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