Internationalized Units: Formatting, Locale-Aware Representation, Conversion, and Grammatical Inflection
In multilingual applications, correctly handling measurement units goes far beyond translating their names. This session explores four key aspects of internationalized units: how units are represented differently across locales (e.g., “Meter” vs. “Metre”), how usage patterns influence the need for automatic unit conversion (e.g., Celsius to Fahrenheit), how units undergo grammatical inflection in various languages (such as plural and case), and how to extract a unit’s grammatical gender to ensure accurate sentence construction during message formatting. Drawing from real-world examples and the latest developments in ICU and ICU4X, this talk aims to deepen the audience’s understanding of the challenges that face unit representations globally and highlight how the latest progress in ICU and ICU4X can help software engineers tackle these problems.