Interculturalization and localization of the text widget in the graphical user interface

Abstract

Because different users operate in different countries and cultural environments, the graphical user interface should accommodate several languages and customs to keep easy-to-use in different countries. The world-wide spread of computer systems increased the importance of this argument. Although several organizations are working on the interculturalization of the graphical user interface, they are doing by bottom-up approaches and tend to be biased to American culture. In this thesis, we propose an interculturalized Text widget developed by a top-down approach. We define a generic Text widget architecture by abstracting the existing Text widgets, and analyze several issues for the interculturalized text processing in the Text widget. Then, we design functional components of the interculturalized Text widget in a way of resolving those issues and show the corresponding model. We also implement to validate the proposed model and analyze it. Interculturalized text processing mechanism guarantees portability and interoperability of the Text widget in different countries and cultural environments. The interculturalized Text widget provides very flexible text processing environment with high user customizability in the graphical user interface. Keywords: graphical user interface, interculturalization, localization, Text widget, interculturalized text processing.