### Localization and Locales

Localization is the process of establishing the cultural environment for an internationalized software application. Localization information is made available to the application through a named data structure known as the locale.

The locale is created from source information that describes the local information necessary for the proper processing of data with respect to language, culture, and character data encoding. This local information is a collection of values identifying the unique formatting specifications. These specifications are categorized according to the particular type of information they deal with, such as date and time information or character classification.

An application establishes the cultural environment by selecting the appropriate locale. Only one locale per locale category can be active at one time. A process can change the active locale at any time during its execution. The active locale affects the behavior of the locale-sensitive interfaces for the entire process. This is called the global locale model.

The default localization model built in to the IBM C and C++ Compilers runtime library is the POSIX C Locale.

The Windows-native localization model is not the same as the model supported by IBM C and C++ Compilers.

Internationalization

Make Your Program International