[Term of the Day]: Internationalization (i18n)
Term of the Day
"Internationalization"
Definition — What is i18n?
i+n1t2e3r4n5a6t7i8o9n10a11l12i13z14a15t16i17o18+n, better known as i18n, is a process of designing and developing a product or service that enables easy localization of target audiences that vary in culture, region or language.
It doesn’t just mean being able to change languages; instead, it means being to accept different forms of data, different settings to match local customs and different strings of data and process it correctly.
For example, we all know about the Amazon website, it is world-wide available. When users access the website from a European country, the response from the amazon website should be in a form that is understandable by European users like currency should be in Euro(€). But at the same time if a user from the US accesses the website then the response/information given by the website should be in some form which is understandable by US people like here currency should be in US dollar($).
In software development, internationalization means removing hard-coded text and visual elements. They are put in a separate database or in a language resource file - one or several for each locale. The source code then contains instructions to include text strings from resource files, allocated by ID or a value name.