haiku/docs/user/locale/localeintro.dox

/*!
\page locale_intro Introduction to the Locale Kit

The Locale Kit provides a set of tools for internationalizing, localizing and
translating your software. This includes not only replacing string with their
translations at runtime, but also more complex tasks such as formatting numbers,
dates, and times in a way that match the locale preferences of the user.

The main way to access locale data is through the be_locale_roster. This is a
global instance of the BLocaleRoster class, storing the data for localizing an
application according to the user's preferred settings. The locale roster also
acts as a factory to instanciate most of the other classes. However, there are
some cases where you will need to instanciate another class by yourself, to
use it with custom settings. For example, you may need to format a date with
a fixed format in english for including in an e-mail header, as it is the only
format accepted there.

Unlike the other kits in Haiku, the Locale kit does not live in libbe. When
building a localized application, you have to link it to liblocale.so. If you
want to use the catalog macros, you also have to link each of your images
(that is, applications, libraries and add-ons) to liblocalestub.a.

*/