Internationalization
Functional Description

Features

• Internationalization
• Translations

Internationalization

Qt Extended's user interface can be completely localized and i18n support covers the following details:

• translation of strings (including localized time and date strings)
• support for localized dictionaries (including the use of multiple dictionaries at the same time)
• support for language-specific common word lists
• adjustments to alignments and layouts where necessary ( including right-to-left support for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew )
• translation of pictures
• localized user help

In some cases internationalization is simple, for example, making a US application accessible to Australian or British users may require little more than a few spelling corrections. But to make a US application usable by Japanese users, or a Korean application usable by German users, requires that the software operate not only in different languages, but use different input techniques, character encodings and presentation conventions.

Qt Extended provides built-in support for all supported languages to make the internationalization process as painless as possible. The built-in font engine is capable of correctly rendering text that contains characters from a variety of different writing systems at the same time.

Many of these writing systems exhibit special features such as special line breaking behavior while some Asian languages are written without spaces between words and line breaking can occur either after every character (with exceptions) as in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, or after logical word boundaries as in Thai.

Languages such as Arabic and Hebrew are bi-directional writing that is, they are written from right to left, except for numbers and embedded English text which is written left to right. The exact behavior is defined in the Unicode Technical Annex #9 - Non-spacing or diacritical marks (accents or umlauts in European languages). Some languages such as Vietnamese make extensive use of these marks and some characters can have more than one mark at the same time to clarify pronunciation.
Ligatures. In special contexts, some pairs of characters get replaced by a combined glyph forming a ligature. Common examples are the fl and fi ligatures used in typesetting US and European books.

Translations

Translations for the following languages are available ( subject to extensions ):

• American English* (en_US)
• Arabic (ar)
• Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR)
• British English* (en_GB)
• French* (fr)
• German* (de)
• Italian* (it)
• Japanese (ja)
• Korean (ko)
• Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)
• Spanish* (es)

Languages can be selected with the help of the [[Language Selection][Language]] application.

A translation package contains the source code translations, translated images and dictionaries. Common word lists are available for the languages marked with *.