Although the current versions of GTK+ and GNOME have the ability to handle internationalization for most of the languages of Europe and East Asia, there are a number of other languages that the current framework is not suitable for handling. These include the languages of the Middle East, which are written in a right-to-left direction, and the languages of South Asia, where the display process involves complicated reordering and shaping of the displayed glyphs. Also, the current internationalization schemes use a different encoding depending on the language, which puts additional burdens on the application developer.
Currently, work is underway to address these problems. For one thing, GTK+ will be converted to use Unicode consistently as an internal encoding. This addresses the question of having multiple encodings, and also helps provide a consistent basis for handling right-to-left and complex-text languages.
The actual information about how to render a particular language will reside in separate dynamically loaded modules. Moving to a modular system will allow independent work on the various languages by people expert in those languages, and will avoid increasing the size of the core to the extent that would happen if all languages were supported in the core libraries.