Internationalisation in Operating Systems for Handheld Devices.

Abstract

Because of their personal nature, handheld devices are expected to conform well to the cultural expectations of their users. In operating system software the support for culture-dependent data representations and interoperability between languages and writing systems is achieved by internationalisation, while native-language user interfaces are realised by subsequent localisation. The most practical way to implement internationalisation is on the operating system level. The aim of this study is to evaluate the level of internationalisation support in five handheld operating systems and platforms. This is performed by identifying the internationalisation requirements of an operating system and examining their implementation in the selected handheld systems. A comparable internationalisation score for each system is produced.