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i18n and L10n
Internationalization (also known in various circles as i18n — the 18
denoting the number of missing letters from the middle of the word) is
designing a site, a piece of software or an application that can be
adapted for many different cultures. It is a process that is generally
only performed once during the creation process. In a sense it’s sort of
a one-size-fits-all solution that paves a neat path towards…
…Localization (often abbreviated to L10n… the same rules apply),
which is the actual adaptation of your design, interface, software,
etc. for a particular area or culture. This includes translating the
text into other languages, making sure pictures are culturally
acceptable and removing references that may not be relevant. Where
internationalization is a process that is done only once, localization
is performed each time you want to target a particular culture/language
set.
Internationalization
To internationalize, you need to be one step ahead. What features
might you want to implement in the future? Even if you haven’t even
thought about breaking into China or India yet, these are both
up-and-coming countries with languages that are non-Latin script.
Unicode is pretty much essential these days and can support all manner
of scripts, languages and characters for when the time comes.
And this also involves the ways in which languages are read. Some
scripts, like Hebrew or Farsi are read from right to left, which will
affect all of your text, text entry controls and scroll bars. You can
add markup in your DTD which will support bidirectional text (and
thankfully Unicode automatically supports it too).
To this end, separating specific elements from your source code that
you may need to localize later is certainly a must. By isolating these
localizable elements, you can ensure that when you change these, the
rest of the code remains untouched. Examples here might involve date
and time formats or name and address inputs. Source: proz.com
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