As an international company we need to keep in mind a number of things when it comes to specifying monetary or currency amounts.
For clients located within the U.S. it makes sense to simply show the dollar amount as follows.
$ 0.00
However, while it may seem sufficient to use a currency symbol such as the dollar sign ($), it is important to make clear which country’s currency is being represented. This same symbol is used in many countries, and could refer to the U.S. dollar, the Canadian dollar, or the Australian dollar. It is also used for the Argentinian or Uruguayan peso. For this reason it makes sense to specify the currency location for each incidence.
For locations outside the U.S., a table of prices, including a currency conversion can help with UX. For instance:
| Description | Amount | In USD |
|---|---|---|
| Item Description | 4.99 € EUR | $ 5.39 |
Note: The above currency conversion may not be accurate, and is being used only for demonstration purposes.
One thing that makes things a little more complicated is the use of the decimal. In the U.S. we are used to using decimals to designate the difference between dollars and cents. However, the same may not be true in other countries. For instance, in France, they use a comma for this designation, and place the symbol after the amount so what is $10.00 in the U.S. would be represented in France as 10,00 $. For larger numbers, they use a space in places where the U.S. or U.K. would use a comma, so $ 10,000.00 would be translated to 10 000,00 $. In other cultures, amounts may be listed as three decimal places. In Japan, 10 yen would be listed as ¥ 10.000.
While western languages tend to read text from left to right, there are other languages, such as Arabic or Hebrew which read from right to left. These need to be taken into account for translations into these languages.
While much of this can be handled systematically, through the use of Unicode, it can still have implications for design, to make sure that layouts follow these formats