Internationalization (I18N) is the process of creating a product that is world-ready and customized for a given language and regional market. Truly internationalized software can display any language in any OS. Internationalization effort should start at the beginning of the product planning stage, and should taper off as Localization effort is beginning.
If internationalization has not been done for a product, the product may:
For more information, see Category:Internationalization
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Coding rules help integrate localization and internationalization into the entire development process.
“Locale” is a term generally used to describe a combination of Region and Language. Changing the locale affects such items as:
Why is locale important? For example, all the following characters are sorted before B, right?
aÀàÁáÂâÃãÄäÅåĀāĂ㥹Ǻǻ
Not always:
Ensuring your code recognizes the locale and is Unicode-enabled takes care of these issues for you.
The English characters in the word “Internationalization” have been replaced with various characters from various languages, in such a way that English readers can still read the text, but that it is clear the word has been changed. This is called pseudo-translation, which is one method of flushing out internationalization defects prior to localization.
All visible product elements need to be localized:
Developer guides to internationalization (i18n) within the MeeGo UX project: