would cause an error to be raised error notification may be as simple as recognizing a visual difference or it may involve an error message being issued during programmatic testing the correct value u201c sun u201d would be required in place of u201c dim u201d during operation 260 locale information changes are provided by testers or knowledgeable users involved with the validation and applied to the extracted information previously obtained during operation 254 making updated extracted information available for formatting again starting with operation 256 this process is continued until the formatted output is correctly validated fig3 illustrates a flow diagram of an overall process for a preferred embodiment of the invention the process is performed on a computer system storing the locale source file using an extractor and making use of appropriate associated rules patterns and substitution information including logic and knowledge of how to interpret a locale source file temporary data of the intermediate output of the extractor and final results of the process text strings for testing the set of keyboard rules patterns and substitutions are referred to as keyword directives a sample portion of a locale source file conforming to posix locale source conventions is depicted in example a a description of which follows posix locale source convention is iso iec 9945 1 1900 ieee standard 1003 2 1990 information technology portable operating system interface posix u2122 shell utilities ieee standards 1003 2 and 1003 2a the.