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Three Letter Language Codes

Starting with Developer’s Studio 7, MFC directly supports satellite resource DLLs with no extra effort on the part of the programmer. Applications built with Developer’s Studio 6.x can prepare for this by using the same naming convention that Developer’s Studio 7 will use.

The naming convention for satellite DLLs is modXXX.dll where mod is the name of the base binary module and XXX is the Microsoft defined three letter abbreviation for the target language. For example, if an application is named App.exe then the resources for Italy would be AppITA.dll. If a DLL is BesGui.dll then the Spanish resources for this DLL will be in DesGuiESN.DLL.

Microsoft has an extensive list of language and locale codes. We are only interested in a subset of these. Further, we want to map the variations into the base language itself.

For the purposes of this document, the supported language codes are

• ENG – English
• DEU – German
• FRA – French
• JPN – Japanese
• ESN – Spanish
• ITA – Italian

There's one fly in the ointment. Microsoft's locale codes do not map into the ISO method of define locales. They do "lc-CC" where 'lc' is a language code and 'CC' is a country code. As an example, en-US.