What is Internationalization?

Internationalization (known as "i18n" for short) evolved out of the growing need for translation and localization. Its main purpose is to make sure that the source content is ready to go into multiple languages. This means i18n occurs at the beginning of content and product development, not after the content is ready for translation. 

Internationalization primarily refers to how software code is written to ensure that versions beyond the original language version can be created correctly, less expensively, and with greater ease. Proper i18n can save significant expense, time, and headaches for everyone involved in the language work down the line. 

There are many benefits to i18n, including:

• Easier adaptation of software applications (or other content) to multiple locales
• Reduced time and cost for localization
• Single, internationalized source code for all versions of the product
• Simpler maintenance
• Improved quality and code architecture
• Reduced overall cost of ownership of the multiple versions of the product
• Adherence to international standards

Here are some areas where internationalization helps remove problems from multilingual products:

Basic Efficiency

• Independence from a specific language/character set encoding
• Independence from specific cultural conventions

User Interface

• Removal of hard-coded text
• Minimization of concatenated text strings
• Careful use of in-line variables
• Compatibility with third-party tools

Support for non-western languages

• Unicode compliance for global text display
• Accommodation of double-byte languages (for example, Japanese)
• Accommodation of right-to-left languages (for example, Arabic)

Global usability

• Allowing products to operate in more than one language at a time
• Processing and storing multilingual data (for example, user input in multiple languages)