[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]
The language of origin is the language in which a class is created. Typically a class is created using the language that is supported by the current machine, but this is not a requirement. WBEM supports classes that use characters and words from any language.
A class, its instances, properties, and qualifiers share a single language of origin; a class cannot be created with multiple languages. For example, the class name cannot be defined in Russian while the property names are in English or German.
To specify the language of origin, attach the Locale qualifier to the class. Using this qualifier facilitates optimization because if the user is requesting data presented in English and the Locale qualifier indicates that the classes containing the data were defined in English, no translation is required.
The value of the Locale qualifier is a character string containing the name of the localization scheme, such as Desktop Management Interface (DMI) or the Microsoft scheme, a single backslash, and scheme-specific information. In MOF syntax, a double backslash is required to indicate the single embedded backslash, as is also the case in the C and C++ programming languages.
Although WBEM is designed to support locale strings from multiple systems, only Microsoft-specific locale strings are supported in this release. The localization schemes used on Microsoft Windows platforms appear with the "MS\\" prefix, followed by the 32-bit locale identifier in the form of a hexadecimal string. The value of the Locale qualifier on Windows platforms typically corresponds to the locale identifier of the current user available from the Microsoft® Win32® API. For cross-platform use, there is no widespread standard for identifying or specifying a locale, and no standard in use by Microsoft that is also recognized on other platforms.
The following strings illustrate values for the Locale qualifier that identify Microsoft locales:
"MS\\0x409" (Microsoft Locale Id, English)
"MS\\0x40C" (Microsoft Locale Id, French)
Other localization schemes use their own prefixes and formats:
"ISO639-2\\deu" (ISO 639-2 trigraph for German)
"ISO639\\en" (ISO 639 for English)
"RFC1766\\az-arabic" (RFC 1766, Azerbaijani with arabic script)
"RFC1766\\az-cyrillic" (RFC 1766, Azerbaijani with cyrillic script)
Locale strings specified by users when they log on are progated to providers so that they can attempt to supply localized data for the end user. However, there is no automatic translation between locales. If no locale is specified, then it is assumed that the current locale of the running operating system is in force.