Internationalization and Localization to Chinese for the Species 2000 Project – ChinaNode

Qiao Hui-Jie¹, Ji Li-Qiang¹

¹ Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Datun Road, Chaoyang, Beijing, 100101, China, e-mail: qiaohj@ioz.ac.cn

The goal of SP2000 is to create a validated checklist of the entire world's species, which includes scientific names, common names, references and distributions information. In 2006, the sub-project named as SP2000 ChinaNode was launched by both the secretariat of SP2000 and the specialists in China. For Chinese is one of the multi-bytes character sets in the world and China is a new participant country in SP2000, the internationalization and localization is an important part in this sub-project.

This paper focuses on the localization process about the Species 2000 Project (SP2000) - ChinaNode. Its original goal is to make the people who are used to work only with the computer environment of one-byte ACSII or ISO8859 characters to read the contents in Chinese. And it is the ultimate design aim that anyone in the world can read in any writing system which appears in Unicode Standard. The most important parts include the character sets, required standards, implement store, display and search Chinese words in this system.

In order to display Chinese in the environment of one-byte characters, a series of character sets management tools were designed. These tools can create a Chinese words warehouse based on UTF-8 encoding and convert each letter which cannot be supported in English system to a formatted file, then display this file in the client browser.

These tools can be extended to other languages. Through this solution, any writing system can be shown in both website and CD of Sp2000. Users need not install any additional language package any more.