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. Most of the time, you
should be able to use the default BLocale object and its convenience methods to
get things formatted according to the user preferences.  However, you can also
use the various formatter classes directly when you need a more advanced
formatting.  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.

Note that creating a new format is a costly operation. The idea is that you
create your format object once and reuse it accross your application to format
all the stuff that needs it.

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.

*/