Internationalization is the process of designing and developing software or Web applications so that they can be easily adapted to various linguistic and cultural environments without additional programming or engineering. Central to internationalization is the separation of language and cultural data from the source code.
Internationalization is closely connected to globalization and localization:
- Globalization is the process of putting in place business practices and processes necessary to take a product globally, e.g., technical, marketing, personnel.
- Localization is the process of adapting a product to the requirements of a target locale, i.e., to the set of standards and rules specific to a language and geographical area.
The terms are commonly abbreviated following the same pattern: the first letter of the word followed by the number of letters between the first and the last letter followed by the last letter: I18N=internationalization, G11N=globalization, and L10N=localization.
Thus, internationalization is a design/technical part of globalization. It reduces time and cost of getting a product to international markets and facilitates localization of the product in a specific market.