Chapter 11: Localizing the Site

We live in a global community consisting of people from many countries. The term localizing refers to the capability to present a site in the language of the local user, and to use the correct symbols for currency, decimals, dates, and so on. ASP.NET 2.0 adds some new features to its arsenal for localizing a site that make it easier than ever before. The developer is freed from writing clumsy code for managing multiple languages and locale settings, and translated strings and other resources can be compiled into independent files that can be easily plugged into the site, even after deployment, to add support for a new language that wasn't even considered when the site was designed. In this chapter, you'll look at the importance of localization and learn how the new ASP.NET features can help you localize your site with little effort.

Problem

These days, it seems that the word globalization is used everywhere. The beauty of the Internet and the World Wide Web is that you can reach anyone who has a computer and a phone line or some other sort of Internet connection, be it for fun, passion, business, and so on. Nevertheless, if you want to be able to communicate with people, you must speak (or write) a language the people can understand. Due to the great proliferation of English as a primary or secondary language, many sites use English as their base language, even if they are not run by people for which this language is the main tongue. However, offering a site in the user's first language is often a great advantage over competitors that don't, because all users find it easier and more comfortable reading their primary language even when they can understand others. This is true not only for text but also for the format used to display and parse numbers, dates, and currency names. In fact, an Italian reader, like me, would interpret 07/02/2006 as the February 2, whereas an American would interpret it to be July 2. And while this may cause misunderstandings when reading the date, it may cause errors when users insert data in one format while the system expects a different one. For this reason, any modern site that wants to target a worldwide audience must be multi-language, displaying numbers and dates according to the user's local settings, and translating the full site's text (or at least the most important parts) into the user's primary language.

Fully localizing a site based on dynamic content (articles, products, forums, polls, etc.) is an extremely difficult task, and there are a number of ways to approach it. The difficulty varies considerably depending on whether you intend to localize everything or just static content (text on the page layouts, menus, links, and page, section and field titles and descriptions, and so forth). ASP.NET 2.0 introduces some new features that significantly simplify localizing static parts of a site, and this is what I'll cover in this chapter. Conversely, localizing the dynamic content would be much harder and would require quite a lot of rework on the database, the UI structure, and the object model. If that's what you really need to achieve, it's usually better to create separate language-specific sites with their own content.