Introduction to Configuration and Management
Windows 2000 Professional makes the process of deploying and supporting Windows 2000 across language boundaries easier and more flexible. To meet the needs of global businesses, Microsoft offers the following products:
Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional English Version
Translated editions of Windows 2000 Professional (available in 24 languages)
Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional MultiLanguage Version
Table 7.5 compares the multilanguage support provided by each edition of Windows 2000 Professional.
Table 7.5 Multilanguage Support Provided by Windows 2000
Features and Benefits |
English Version of Windows 2000 Professional |
Translated Version of Windows 2000 Professional |
Multilanguage Version of Windows 2000 Professional |
|---|---|---|---|
Features for users |
User can enter, view, and print data in more than 60 languages. |
User can view a translated user interface (menus, help files, dialog boxes and folder names). |
User can switch the user interface, (menus, help files, and dialog boxes) to a preferred language. |
Benefits for Administrators |
Provides support for working with documents in other languages. |
Provides native-language user environment. |
Provides flexibility for meeting the needs of a multilingual user base. |
The Microsoft MultiLanguage technology consists of two elements: multilingual editing and viewing and the multilanguage user interface that comes with Windows 2000 Professional MultiLanguage Edition.
Multilingual Editing and Viewing Features
The multilingual editing and viewing features allow users to view and edit information in more than 60 languages. For example, a user with the English version of Windows 2000 Professional can work with a Japanese document without requiring a Japanese version of Windows 2000. This feature is part of all editions of Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 2000 Server, including both the English and the translated editions. This function is ideal for users who only occasionally need to communicate in another language. The ability to edit, process, and view documents in multiple languages is possible because of several components of the Windows 2000 Professional architecture, as described in the following sections.
Unicode Support
Windows 2000 Professional uses Unicode version 2.1 as its base character encoding. Unicode is an international standard that represents the characters that are in common use in the world's major languages. The benefit of Unicode is that it allows for unambiguous, plaintext representation of data, which simplifies sharing of data in a mixed platform environment.
National Language Support API
National Language Support in Windows 2000 Professional consists of a set of system tables that provide the following information:
Locale information such as date, time, number, or currency format or translated names of countries and regions, languages, or days of the month and week.
Character mapping tables that map local character encodings (ANSI or OEM) to Unicode.
Keyboard layout information.
Character typing information.
Sorting information.
With Windows 2000 Professional, users can change their system settings to reflect those of their chosen locale through the Regional Options in Control Panel.
Multilingual API
The multilingual API contains functions to process text input and display — for example, changing the keyboard layout tables or the fonts used to display text. It also handles text layout issues, such as vertical text for Japanese or right-to-left text containing ligatures for Arabic. Applications that use these APIs contain basic, transparent support for creating mixed-language documents.
Resource Files
With Windows 2000 Professional, information that changes from language to language, such as menu text, dialog boxes and Help text, is stored in separate, language-specific resource files. This allows the system code to be shared by all language editions of Windows 2000 Professional — the only change from edition to edition are the translated resources.