Network Programming in .NET

If you have a multi-lingual app or website that needs to show a drop down list of country names, then it suddenly adds 195 words to your translation file, which is going to make your translation word count shoot up suddenly.

Surely, someone else has done this already?, yes, they have. The Unicode consortium have a public file that you can download that contains a list of countries, and lots of other information translated into many different languages; here; http://unicode.org/Public/cldr/1.7.0/core.zip

I extracted the two letter files ({language}.xml) from core/common/main, removed the dtd definition, and put it in to a folder named /data/localisation off the root of my website.

public static string Country(string code, string culture)
{
// Source: http://unicode.org/Public/cldr/1.7.0/core.zip
var locale = new CultureInfo(culture).TwoLetterISOLanguageName.ToLower();
var strLocalXmlFile = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(“/data/Localisation/” + locale + “.xml”);
var xdoc = new XmlDocument();
xdoc.Load(strLocalXmlFile);
var xn = xdoc.SelectSingleNode(“//territory[@type='” + code + “‘]”);
return xn.InnerText;
}

Then you can call Country(“GB”,”sv-SE”) to get Storbritannien

Of course, there is many more things that you may want to translate, and nothing is better than a human translator, which I’d recommend OutsourceTranslation.com to find one.