United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Statistical Division Principles and Guidelines on Building Multilingual Applications for Official Statistics Steven Vale UNECE

Background  Growing interest in sharing, fueled by: HLG-BAS Vision / Strategy Activities of Sharing Advisory Board Need to be more efficient  Most software developed in a specific context Sharing is not part of the initial specification Software not optimised for use by others

 Published February 2012  Endorsed by HLG-BAS  Electronic, living document  Feedback always welcome

Principles (1-4)  Software should be multilingual by design  Multilingual applications should support additional languages without reengineering  The user interface should always be separated from the code  Identify and adapt all elements of the user interface

Principles (5-9)  Plan the storage and management of multilingual user interface elements  Decide the best way to select the locale  Presentation of data should follow the customs of the locale  Processing and saving of data should follow the customs of the locale  Reuse standards such as program libraries for localisation

Principles  Include estimates for provision of multilingual support in estimates of development costs  Include documentation as part of localisation efforts  Understand Unicode and use it where possible  Consider what fonts to use and how to use them

Issues for discussion  Are these principles / guidelines useful for your organisation?  What other standards are needed to increase interoperability of software?  How to ensure sharing is part of the specification, not an afterthought?

Questions?