Best practices for internationalization in layered applications

Question

I'm building a new application in JSE for which I want to support internationalization. I've never built such an application. I'm looking for the best practices for internationalization. The application will be writing the translated data in files or a database. I've searched for best practices but I didn't find anything about best practices for internationalization in layered applications.

• Should I put all the internationalization data in some layer or next to the object they are about?

• Could I directly use the properties files as a kind of enum to do a switch case?
  Or can I reverse engineer the data catched and know the default internationalize value and work with it?

Answer 1

I would consider avoiding redundant and therefor potentially inconsistent translations and other i18n settings (decimal point, number formats etc.) a best practice here.

It depends on your environment/framework which means you have to achieve that, and where you need to add homegrown solutions. Can't say anything about JSE; in Qt I'm using external translation files that can be loaded by multiple modules/apps and put the settings either into a central getter or the global settings where possible.

Synchronizing all modules when the settings have changed is another challenge. The simplest solution is often a restart, applying them at runtime in a consistent and all-encompassing way usually needs a lot of additional effort.

The decision how to solve these issues may even affect your architecture, so it should be addressed early in the design process.