Multilingual Support as in Windows

[Muhammad Asif <mdasif@wol.net.pk>]

hi,

I need some clear guidelines towards a bit confusing issue. I need to 
evaluate what  kind of support/services are available in Linux as in 
windows xp for devloping and viewing Multilingual applications.
Such applications need support both at backend and front end. Currently i 
need more to work on fron-end support. What i can understand yet is some 
services like Regional Settings provided by OS like windows can be used to 
format Multilingual data according to a Locale. Similalry OS should be 
capable of storing/retreiving data in Unicode. I need some 
comparison/feature of Linux what kind of support/services it provides to 
develop/view the multilingual apps?

Do we need language specific distribution of linux to acheive above goals 
or like windows we can change settings specific to locale within same 
distribution?

Comments,URLs, Article or doc will be helpful for detail insight of issue.

Thanks a lot for your time.

Anyz