Software internationalization aims to make software accessible and usable by users all over the world. For a Java application that does not consider internationalization at the beginning of its development stage, our previous work proposed an approach to locating need-to-translate constant strings in the Java code. However, when being applied on web applications, it can identify only constant strings that may go to the generated HTML texts, but cannot further distinguish constant strings visible at the browser side (needto-translate) from other constant strings (not need-to-translate). In this paper, to address significant challenges in internationalizing web applications, we propose a novel approach to locating need-totranslate constant strings in web applications. Among those constant strings that may go to the generated HTML texts, our approach further distinguishes strings visible at the browser side from non-visible strings via a novel technique called flag propagation. We evaluated our approach on three real-world open source PHPbased web applications (in total near 17 KLOC): Squirrel Mail, Lime Survey, and Mrbs. The empirical results demonstrate that our approach accurately distinguishes visible strings from non-visible strings among all the constant strings that may go to the generated HTML texts, and is effective for locating need-to-translate constant strings in web applications.

This thesis is a review paper that covers and summarizes the way software is prepared for international markets nowadays. Internationalization and localization of software are the key topics this thesis deals with. Therefore it first analyzes and portrays major differences in culture and language and gives advice about how to deal with these differences when developing internationally usable software. Then it describes some internationalization recommendation for helping to prepare software for easy localization. In this context a standard encoding scheme for international characters and text is explained. Furthermore, an example is provided of how internationalization and localization of software is done by means of a popular existing operating system platform. Finally, some commercial software localization tools and Open Source XML standards are shown making the processes of internationalization and localization easy and efficient. Contents