Internationalization is the process of generalizing an application so that it can easily be customized--or localized--to run in more than one language environment. You can provide internationalized software that will produce output in a user's native language, format data (such as currency values and dates) according to local standards, and tailor software to a specific culture.

• Internationalizing Your Application
  This 53-page document describes how to create an internationalized application. It defines some common terms, explains how to set the current locale and limitations of the locale system, and describes various ways in which different cultures affect the way a string can be viewed, as well as other key items relating to internationalization.
• Localization Programming Rules
• Localization FAQ

• Internationalization
• I18N
• Localization
• L10N
• Translation
• NLS
• Locale
• Characters

This is the process of establishing the application to accommodate users with various culture conventions. X/Open further defines internationalization as the processing of developing programs without prior knowledge of the language, cultural data, or character encoding schemes they are expected to handle.

This is the so-called the codeset independent programming model. The X/Open internationalization model is adopted as the programming model for internationalization.

In general, culture sensitive operations include the following:

Date/Time format Monetary format Writing direction Word breaking Classifications (such as space/controls/printable/etc.) Numeric expression Messages and dialogs Document format - page size, line break, and etc... Icons and Symbols Fonts

This is the acronym for internationalization (there are 18 letters between the I and N in internationalization).

Localization

This is the process of establishing information within a computer system specific to each supported language, cultural data, and coded character set combination. (X/Open)

L10N

This is the acronym for localization (there are 10 letters between the L and N in localization).

Translation

This is one of many localization tasks. It involves translating and transforming the user interface environment into a culturally correct, user friendly environment; this includes message translation and interface adjustment.

NLS

National Language Support

Locale

The locale is an association of language instances of collating sequence, character conversions and character classification tables, language information, and message catalogues.

Characters

Character Set: A finite set of different graphic or control characters that is complete for a given purpose.

Coded character set: A set of unambiguous rules that establish the character set and the relationship between the characters in the set and their coded representations.

Encoding scheme: A set of specific definitions that describe the philosophy used to represent character data.

Character: A member of a set of elements used for the organization, control, or representation of data.

Glyph: A recognizable abstract graphic symbol which is independent of any specific design.

Font: A collection of glyph images having the same basic design.

The net is what you see on the screen. The "Ä" character can be presented in different forms depending on the stage of your runtime environment - file, I/O, processing, display or device level. For example, the "Ä" can be represented as 0x00C4 on the disk as in Unicode and, in 0xC4 for I/O (8-bit only I/O environment for example) and 0x000000C4 in a wchar_t process. Furthermore, the "Ä" will be represented as 0xC4 if using the ISO 8859-1 font. And the "Ä" is represented as 0x63 to be the network encoding for targeted EBCDIC hosts.