During the planning and design phase, the design team gives serious consideration to extending the market for the PT application. The decision to localize the application for Germany, Japan, and the United States means the PT application already addresses many localization issues: diverse formatting (dates, times, and numerals), ideographic characters, and languages.
This section examines the effort required and the issues that appear when the design team creates additional localized versions of the PT application. Neighboring countries and regions frequently share conventions; people use versions of a common language, the same alphabet, and the same format for time, date, and numeric information. Clearly, the more conventions a new locale has in common with locales for which the application is already localized, the simpler it is to add the new locale.
The following topics summarize the design team's efforts to extend the PT application to similar locales: