Locale specification

You manage support for internationalization using locales. Each locale identifies a language and country or region code. By identifying the locale to use when displaying information to a user, you ensure that the user sees information that is specific to their locale: they see your site's Web pages in their preferred language, with numbers and dates in their expected format.

A locale comprises a language and a country or region: for example, “English and United States” or “Italian and Switzerland”. The same language may be used in more than one country or region: French in France, Switzerland, and Canada for example. In one country or region there may be speakers of more than one language: French, German, Italian, and Romansch in Switzerland for example.

The ISO standards 639 and 3166 specify a list of standard abbreviations for languages, countries and regions that you must use. Some common language abbreviations are: Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), English (en), French (fr), German (de), Hindi (hi), Japanese (ja), and Spanish (es).

Some common country or region abbreviations are: Canada (CA), China (CN), France (FR), Germany (DE), India (IN), Indonesia (ID), Japan (JA), United Kingdom (GB), and United States (US).

By combining a language and a country or region, you can uniquely specify a locale. For example: en_US (English-United States), it_CH (Italian-Switzerland), and zh_TW (Chinese-Taiwan). Locales are stored in the Sterling Configurator Visual Modeler using this representation.