Introduction

The more people who live in the networked and computerized society, the more important the communication tools become. We envision that, in near future, non-technical people including kids will express and exchange their ideas using such tools. They may such ideas collaboratively and communicate them over the network [1].

The network and the tool are getting faster and ready for creating such a collaborative environment. What we need is good software that is usable by people all over the world. Because the people will want to express their ideas in their own natural languages, such software must be capable of not only end-user accessible idea authoring, but also multiple natural languages. In the other words, it has to be a multilingualized system.

To achieve this goal, we started from a late-bound, dynamic object-oriented system called Squeak. Squeak is an implementation of a dynamic objects environment. Most notably, its virtual machine (VM) is written in itself and has the ability to control every pixel displayed on the screen. Squeak also provides various end-user collaborative facilities. Such functionalities include an end-user programming environment called SqueakToys, a web server, a GUI framework that supports remote collaboration, etc.

However, Squeak has a weakness in its multilingual aspect; Squeak's text handling classes lack the ability to handle natural languages other than English. We think that Squeak will be an ideal environment for network collaboration once it is multilingualized.

There are three issues to consider when implementing a multilingual system. Firstly, the displayed or printed result from the system should be acceptable in terms of the appearance.

Secondly, the system should allow the user to use characters from different languages (scripts) without any burden. For instance, the system should easily support applications such as Arabic-English or Chinese-Japanese electric dictionaries in which different scripts are used together.

Thirdly, the system should be portable among the variety of platforms. A multilingualized system will be used by people who use different hardware and software. The system should be usable on all those platforms.

We aim to fulfill those three requirement in this project. This is an on-going project, but the system is already being used in several places. This fact proves that we are on the right track toward our goal.

In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of the multilingualization of Squeak.

The following sections are organized as follows. In section 2, we discuss the overall design goals and the prerequisites for understanding the issues of multilingualization. From section 3 to section 9, we discuss the implementation of the added features. Finally, in section 11, we conclude the paper.