What is the modern approach?

The general technique used now is to internationalize the programs. This means to prepare them so that the code never needs modification--separate files contain the translatable information. This involves a number of modifications to the code:

• move all translatable strings into separate files called resource files, and make the code access those strings when needed. These resource files can be flat text files, databases, or even code resources, but they are completely separate from the main code, and contain nothing but the translatable data.

• change variable formatting to be language-independent. This means that dates, times, numbers, currencies, and messages all call functions to format according to local language and country requirements.

• change sorting, searching and other types of processing to be language-independent.

Once this process is concluded, you have an internationalized program. To localize that program then involves no changes to the source code. Instead, just the translatable files are typically handed off to contractors or translation agencies to modify. The initial cost of producing internationalized code is somewhat higher than localizing to a single market, but you only pay that once. The costs of simply doing a localization, once your code is internationalized, is a fraction of the previous cost--and avoids the considerable cost of maintenance and source code control for multiple code versions