User:Netfriend/Interlingual

Communication of identical ideas or concepts between any number of spoken or written languages

Roots of Interlingual
From the Latin root "Inter" meaning "together, mutually, or reciprocally" and from a derivative of "Linguistics" being "the study of languages", combined to imply "reciprocality of languages", in other words, having the ability to communicate identical ideas to and from any spoken or textual language.

Multilingualism in Computing
In computing, software is said to be multilingual when the user interface language can be switched between languages and charcter sets. The translating user interface is often part of the software localization process which also includes other adaptations such as units and date conversions.

Many software applications are available in several languages, with a total number of languages usually ranging from a handful (the most spoken languages) to dozens of languages for the most popular applications (like office suite, web browser, etc). Due to the status of English in computing, software development nearly always requires using it (but see also Non-English-based programming languages) and so almost all commercial software version is available in English.

Interlingualism in Computing
Beyond an application providing a user interface in multiple languages, special challenges are presented in presenting underlying data in multiple languages. Transactional software using data such as banking or sales information must be immediately translated without loss of meaning and represented in the written language and character set of the end user regardless of the language and character set of the creator of the data. Having the ability to represent data and concepts without loss of meaning is deemed interlingual data.

Fewer software applications are available to perform the translation at the transaction level. The Peoplesoft system provides Interlingual capabilities within their ERP software. Interlingual SQL by Net Foundation provides an application that transforms databases or RDBMS data into interlingual data. The major databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL provide internal storage capabilities for storing multilingual data but leave translation to the database users.