title: How to use enable pseudo-locale in Windows for testing?
body: <p>Windows Vista introduced the concept of three <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd319106%28v=vs.85%29.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">pseudo-locales</a>:</p>
  <pre><code>Pseudo Locale        Locale Name  LCID           
  ===================  ===========  ======
  Base                 qps-ploc     0x0501
  Mirrored             qps-mirr     0x09ff
  East Asian-language  qps-asia     0x05fe
  </code></pre>
  <p>Enabling the <strong>Base</strong> locale is useful, because you can check that your application is using the current locale for formatting of items such as dates, times, numbers, money.</p>
  <p>For example when the current locale is set to <strong>Base</strong>, a date will be formatted as:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>[Шěđлеśđαỳ !!!], 8 ōf [Μäŕςћ !!] ōf 2006</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>Builds of <a href="http://www.siao2.com/2011/04/11/10152035.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Windows are actually done in pseudo</a>, and then localized into english:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <h2><a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/e7/engineering-windows-7-for-a-global-market" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market</a></h2>
  <p><strong>Pseudo-Localization</strong></p>
  <p>To prevent common globalization bugs, pseudo-localized builds were created. Pseudo-localization is a process that creates a localized product in an artificial language. That language is identical to English except that each character is written with a different character that visually resembles the English character. Except for being entirely machine generated, we create the pseudo-localized builds exactly the same way as we create the localized builds. Because even monolingual US software developers can read pseudo-localized text, it has proven to be an excellent way to find globalization problems early in the development cycle. In the Windows 7 beta, some UI elements were still in their pseudo-localized form, causing some interesting theories about what the meaning might be. We hope we have solved the mystery with this blog post. :-)</p>
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/bFd6p.png" alt="Pseudo-loc control panel" /></p>
  <p><strong>Control Panel Dialog in Pseudo-localized Windows 7</strong></p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>Another value in the use of these locale's: it tests that your application doesn't assume that a 16-bit <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd319102" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><code>PRIMARYLANGID</code></a> is made up of an:</p>
  <ul>
  <li>8-bit primary language id</li>
  <li>8-bit sublanguage id</li>
  </ul>
  <p>when <a href="http://www.siao2.com/2005/03/02/383458.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">in reality a PRIMARYLANGID is</a>:</p>
  <ul>
  <li>a 10-bit primary language id</li>
  <li>a 6-bit sublanguage id</li>
  </ul>
  <p>or graphically:</p>
  <pre><code>+-----------------------+-------------------------+
  |     Sublanguage ID    |   Primary Language ID   |
  +-----------------------+-------------------------+
   15                   10 9                       0   bit
  </code></pre>
  <p>These three pseudo-locale's finally walk off the end of the 8th bit (something that Microsoft has been weary of doing for breaking buggy applications).</p>
  <p><strong>How do i enable pseudo-locale's in Windows?</strong></p>
  <h2>See also</h2>
  <ul>
  <li><a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd319106%28v=vs.85%29.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MSDN: Pseudo-Locales</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd374118%28v=vs.85%29.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MSDN: Using Pseudo-Locales for Localization Testing</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnste/archive/2006/06/27/647915.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MSDN Blogs: Pseudo Locales in Windows Vista Beta 2</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://www.siao2.com/2011/04/11/10152035.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MSDN Blogs: One of my colleagues is the &quot;Pseudo Man&quot; (a rich source of puns in conversation!)</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://www.siao2.com/2006/08/16/702877.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MSDN Blogs: Walking off the end of the eighth bit</a></li>
  </ul>