Abstract: A system is disclosed for presenting information which reflects the users' cultural preference, including language and other conventions, that can manage locale categories without requiring application programs to manage all the overhead of repetitive changes to locale category values. Users merely specify their cultural preferences through the application programs and the operating system assigns a stack from the working memory for each specified category of cultural preference, and pushes onto the stack the location in the working memory of a file for the category of cultural preference specified, the file having been transferred from a locale database of files that contain code for formatting according to the cultural preferences.