I18n isn't that hard. One of my projects is an Arabic concordancer. A concordancer is a simple tool that loads a large text file, say the complete works of Shakespeare, and then allows the user to search for a word or phrase. The concordance is then the target word in its context. It is used by linguists to understand how words behave, and especially lexographers when defining new words, etc.
The problem is, the ones that exist don't cope with Arabic correctly (due to its right-to-left nature). I have a number of Arabic colleagues who need such a tool, so I've been obliging. Anyway, I can't read or speak Arabic, but creating such a tool, and adding i18n functionality has been really simple (in Java at least). Basically, all strings that would appear in your interface are stored in an external text file of "key = value" pairs. You have a separate file per language supported (these files are known as ResourceBundles and share the same name except they have a unique locale suffix) where the keys are the same, but the values are language specific. You need to load the Bundle in each class that needs these labels, but Java will load the appropriate language bundle depending on the current locale.
'Tis really easy. Anyway, despite this mass exodus of the forums, I hope that the Java experts will keep reading the Programming board, as I have some more Swing questions in the pipeline :P
arooaroo
Understood that i18n isn't that hard, but that's not what Dusty's talking about. He's talking about voice recognition. Is it just as easy to implement voice recognition for English as it is for Arabic? If you implement one do you automatically get the other? Jason -- If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are.