ABSTRACT
Nowadays, computers have become pervasive and are used all over the world. Also, many countries do not use English as their main language. They may not even know English at all. Therefore, we need to make our software amenable for use in any language. Of course, some languages may be so complicated that we may not be able to make our software amenable to be used in such languages. What is involved in writing programs so they can be used in multiple languages? What code is written inside the program is not of any concern to the user. What concerns a user is what is seen, either on the screen or the report, and the ability of the program to accept inputs in his/her language. Basically, this involves displaying all labels on the screen or on the report in the language desired by the user. Luckily, numbers have no language and we need not build in any special actions for translating the numbers. The data controls are language-independent and accept data in any language. So, we can achieve the multilingual software by maintaining tables with the labels in different target languages and loading them during the form-load event. How exactly to achieve this is described in this chapter.
