Internationalization (i18n)
The objective of an internationalized design is to eliminate unnecessary specialized customizations for regional markets and to promote easier, cheaper, faster and higher quality localization efforts.
Internationalization generally involves a one-time, up-front investment.
What is internationalization?
Internationalization refers to designing and developing a product, application, or content, for use anywhere in the world according to the user's native language and customs. There are 3 key requirements.
- An internationalized design eliminates all cultural assumptions (e.g., text will use only the characters A-Z, words will be separated by spaces, dates will only be mm-dd-yyyy, etc.) that can prevent usage in other cultures.
- An internationalized design provides functionality necessary for users of different cultures. (e.g. support for input methods)
- The other key requirement of an internationalized design is that it must be efficient to localize. Efficiency is measured by the cost to develop, the cost to support over the product's lifetime, and the speed of bringing products to regional markets.
Examples of internationalization concerns
- Allowing users to enter text in any language.
- Allowing users to select the language of the User Interface and reports.
- Supporting a variety of number, currency, date and time formats used around the world.
- Searching, stemming, and sorting data according to native language customs.
- Using graphics, audio, animation, video, and other media that is culturally acceptable globally, or easily customized for local markets.
- Rendering text according to local customs- e.g. right to left or vertical writing, language-specific hyphenation, justification, and word wrapping rules, native fonts, and presentation styles.
What do I need to do?
At a minimum, all textual data must be in Unicode.