The first step to take in preparing your program is to enable translation of display strings by separating them from the rest of your code. This is done via ResourceBundles . These provide a general mechanism that allows you to access strings and other objects according to locale conventions. In principle, they are fairly simple: They simply provide a mapping from <key,locale> to <value>. However, they also supply inheritance among locale resources that allows you to minimize duplication across countries, and gives you a graceful degradation in case the exact locale does not have localized resources. As you will see, the use of ResourceBundles requires a different syntax in Java then it does in C++ (and thus C).

Unfortunately, at this point in time, you will have to change your code by hand to make your strings translatable. You can do the bulk of the work with a PERL script if you want, but you will still have to check the results. The general problem with converting strings automatically is the difficulty in distinguishing display strings from non-display strings. In the case of Java, once the commercial Java development environments fully support resource bundles, this task should become easier, since they will make it easy to avoid mixing display strings in the code in the first place.

Resource bundles do not have the same meaning in Java as they do in C/C++. In Java, they are both the object and the class file (compiled format) storing relevant localized information. In C/C++ a Resource Bundle is the object that allows your programs to interface with a text format resource file containing relevant localized information.

Resource bundles in Java are very flexible--so flexible that getting started may be mystifying. You can use list resource bundles, property resource bundles, or you can make your own. You can have fine-grained bundles or coarse-grained, and so on. To give you some direction, we'll start by showing one particular way to use resource bundles, you can see other options by looking at the JDK API.

In Java, create a class called MyResources.

A French resource bundle might contain the following

The resource bundle file is a text (ASCII or Unicode) file with the format:

"Key1" {Value1} 
"Key2" {Value2} 
The keys are used to retrieve the value later. You may not have multiple instances of the same key.  
e.g. A French Locale file might contain the following: 

Move the text for display strings into resource bundles. Instead of hard coding the display string, the new code will use a resource bundle and a key to look up the localized display strings.

You have now set up a series of resource pairs of the form "{key, value}" in Java and"key1 {value1)" in C/C++). The resource key (such as "CleanCartridge") can be any unique string you want, even the original string. However, you are better off using short, clear names: remember that your translators will be seeing these too.

If your resource bundle gets too large then you can subdivide it into other resource bundles, such as myPrintingResources following the same pattern. You can make this as fine-grained as you want, so that you only load the resources for a part of your program when that part gets used. You can return arbitrary objects, not only strings, since it is often easier (and sometimes necessary, such as for graphics that need to be localized).

To then create a new French translation for your program in C++ or C:

If more specific locale is available for a language, create a file with a more specific Locale ID name, containing the appropriate information.

For convenience, and because the Java language allows it, you can store localized objects in resource bundles in Java as the following example shows in Java you can store objects in Resource Bundles: