United Nations Economic Commission for EuropeStatistical DivisionUnited Nations Economic Commission for EuropeStatistical Division

Principles and Guidelines on Building Multilingual Applications for Official

Statistics

Steven ValeUNECE

steven.vale@unece.org

Background

Growing interest in sharing, fueled by:• HLG-BAS Vision / Strategy• Activities of Sharing Advisory Board• Need to be more efficient

Most software developed in a specific context• Sharing is not part of the initial specification• Software not optimised for use by others

Published February 2012

Endorsed by HLG-BAS

Electronic, living document

Feedback always welcome

Principles (1-4)

Software should be multilingual by design Multilingual applications should support

additional languages without reengineering

The user interface should always be separated from the code

Identify and adapt all elements of the user interface

Principles (5-9)

Plan the storage and management of multilingual user interface elements

Decide the best way to select the locale Presentation of data should follow the

customs of the locale Processing and saving of data should

follow the customs of the locale Reuse standards such as program

libraries for localisation

Principles 10-13

Include estimates for provision of multilingual support in estimates of development costs

Include documentation as part of localisation efforts

Understand Unicode and use it where possible

Consider what fonts to use and how to use them

Issues for discussion

Are these principles / guidelines useful for your organisation?

What other standards are needed to increase interoperability of software?

How to ensure sharing is part of the specification, not an afterthought?

Questions?

steven.vale@unece.org