We are taking our web application into different locales around the world and I am wondering what are peoples experiences with doing this. We built the database and the pages to allow for internationalization so we are already using UTF-8 encoding and all displayed text is resolved dynamically depending on desired language. What I am puzzled with is how to handle things that are drastically different between nations (cultures). These things include

Addresses, names, telephone numbers etc.

An example is a name. When we developed the system we created First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name columns in our databases and display the forms the same. Well if you are dealing with some cultures they may not seperate the names like this or they may reverse the order and always say the surname first then the first name so a web form that displays

First Name ----
Middle Name ----
Last Name ----

might be confusing to a person that in their culture always addresses a person by the last name first and first name last. This may be a contrived example but since I have not travelled all over the world I don't have a lot of real examples.

I do know that addresses are very different. Especially like in rural India and I am assuming the Middle East.

Addresses are a pain because we format them for all sorts of things including mailings and credit card charges. Right now our database has Street1, Street2, Street3 etc and it works great for most nations but what about when we add a country that does not follow that convention?

So all you developers what have you all done? Do you simply have a catch all field and just allow free form text or do you have targeted forms that change based on the locale/language?

I am curious to here other peoples experiences.

thanks

Doug

People think this is easy but they are unaware of diffrences. With the address and telephonenumbers should be standard now adays. I think the UN have the responsibility for these (google it up). With the names its diffrent in latin countries they normaly have one first name nad two last names fathers first and mothers second. In the protestant world its more common with first-name and second-names and one last name. I think the order of entering the names is unimportant but it needs to be specified. The ofcourse its dates. This one is the hardest since a lot of webpages do not specify whats what. 010203 is what? For me its 3 feb 2001. The best here is to write out the year like 2001 and then really specify. I do not know anything anbout the other calenders but I think they are not used a lot on the web.

A problem is translation of names since they are translated in diffrent ways. This is a problem with chines for example. Look it up.


In island the last names are made from the fathers first name and adding son or dotter and in eastern europe the females got other endings on their last name like: Male-tux female-tuxova etc

Thanks for your insight. I am trying to avoid presenting a specific format for each country as that would/could be overkill and potentially cause other issues. I am looking to simplify if nothing else. I see that most westernized nations are very similar in the format of addresses and names are not that far off except for a few.

What I did not see was a lot of mention in dealing with Arabic and this along with German will be our next two locations.

The Middle East and developing countries can have addresses that are more like directions to your home from a known point. Many people will not know their postal codes. What I might do is for countries like India, Saudi Arabia etc I might provide a single free form Street Address and Name fields but for Westernized countries provide the distinct fields. I would not want to provide a single name field for the US as that would cause problems when displaying names in a table and sorting them. You would be relying on the person inputting the name to do it consistently the same way but when you have hundresd of people doing it the results will be all over the place.

Hopefully someone reading this post will have had similar challenges and can share their strategies.

thanks

Doug