Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

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 ...

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

Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...

, Marathi,

Kannada Kannada () is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka in southwestern India, and spoken by a minority of the population in all neighbouring states. It has 44 million native speakers, and is additionally a ...

, Tamil, and Thai. Based on Multilingual User Interface (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 fro ...

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 Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Office An office is a space where the employees of an organization perform Business administration, administrative Work (human activity), work in order to support and realize the various goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a po ...

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