Internationalization

This page is a hub for resources relating to preparing Eclipse for use in other languages and locales (also known by the abbreviation i18n). This work involves translating strings into other languages (often called NLS for Natural Language Support), handling bi-directional text (BIDI), and preparing content such as dates and times in a format appropriate for a given locale.

Tools Used

Some Eclipse plug-ins use ICU4J APIs when working with locale-specific content.

Most Eclipse plug-ins use a special Eclipse message bundle mechanism for working with translated strings. This mechanism uses traditional Java message.properties files, but without using String-based keys. This has much better memory usage characteristics than traditional approaches.

Bidi

For Bidirectional locales, like Arabic and Hebrew, some new Bidi-specific APIs were added to Eclipse 3.2 that inject directional markers into strings with implicit left-to-right meaning (such as file paths and URLs) in order to render them properly when the text is mixed. This was a necessary due to an apparent bug in rendering these strings containing mixed text on Windows. The problem appears more frequently on Windows platforms (vs Linux), but has also been found to occur on Linux in certain cases. See the Unicode Bidirectional algorithm for the specifics on how strings are normally rendered in bidirectional locales.

When to externalize strings

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