Pattern 52: Internationalization
AKA:

You have considered THE HALT AND THE LAME AND THE STRANGER AT THE DOOR (51). This caters for users with disabilities and attitudes unknowable by you. However, your company may wish to extend into foreign markets or provide content for them. ASCII encoding militates against this. Cultures vary in more than just language.

How to make systems extensible in this context.

Therefore

Use Unicode instead of ASCII or EBCDIC. Tag each page with the appropriate encoding. Ensure that the content databases and search engine can handle foreign characters too. Make sure that error and pop-up responses are not hard coded.

Don’t forget to adjust to the local weights and measures systems, which are much more variable than one might think.

This pattern is terminal within this language. However, there is scope for a complete pattern language covering this area. Nielsen (2000) provides a good deal of discussion of the topic.

Examples
A tourist board in partnership with a motoring organization for a German speaking country wants to attract visitors from Jugoslavia, China, America and Great Britain. We need three new character sets.

American gallons are smaller than British ones. Even though Britain is in Europe and nominally metricated, so that petrol (gasoline!) is sold in litres (liters!) car fascia computers compute fuel economy in mpg and speed limits are advertised in mph. Chinese people still think of distances in li (very approximately a mile). And so on.

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