Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

terminology, a Language Interface Pack (LIP) is a

skin Skin is the layer of usually soft, flexible outer tissue covering the body of a vertebrate animal, with three main functions: protection, regulation, and sensation. Other animal coverings, such as the arthropod exoskeleton, have different de ...

for localizing a Windows operating system in languages such as Lithuanian, Serbian,

Hindi Hindi ( Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...

, Marathi,

Kannada Kannada (; ಕನ್ನಡ, ), originally romanised Canarese, is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the people of Karnataka in southwestern India, with minorities in all neighbouring states. It has around 47 million native s ...

, Tamil, and Thai. Based on

Multilingual User Interface Multilingual User Interface (MUI) enables the Internationalization and localization, localization of the user interface of an Application software, application. MUI is provided by Microsoft as an integrated feature of its operating system Windows ...

(MUI) "technology", a LIP also requires the software to have a base installed language and provides users with an approximately 80 percent localized user experience by translating a reduced set of

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

elements. Unlike MUI packs which are available only to Microsoft volume license customers and for specific SKUs of Windows Vista, a Language Interface Pack is available for free and can be installed on a licensed copy of Microsoft Windows or

Office An office is a space where an organization's employees perform administrative work in order to support and realize objects and goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific du ...

and a fixed "base language". In other words, if the desired additional language has incomplete localization, users may add it for free, while if the language has complete localization, the user must pay for it by licensing a premium version of Windows. (In Windows Vista and Windows 7, only the Enterprise and Ultimate editions are "multilingual".) Typically, a Language Interface Pack is designed for regional markets that do not have full MUI packs or fully localized versions of a product. It is an intermediate localized solution that enables computer users to adapt their software to display many commonly used features in their native language. Each new Language Interface Pack is built using the glossary created by the ''Community Glossary Project'' in cooperation with the local government, academia, and local linguistic experts.

References

{{Microsoft APIs Software add-ons