Internationalisation - Goals

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Internationalisation, also called I18N, is the process of designing and writing software to support different locales without modifications in the source code. There are three main goals in internationalisation:

Making sure your application is able to process text from any locale. Even if the user interface is not translated, you should ensure correct handling of the data you are processing. For example, allow file names with double-byte characters, use the correct upper/lowercasing, and display the date and time according to the locale of the data, etc.

Making sure the interface of your application can be localised without changes in the source code. This is the easy part. By respecting several rules, you can enable your product to be localised without problems. Any translatable text needs to be accessible. You should also ensure that graphics, colours, sounds and any UI elements can be modified without re-compiling the core of your application.

Making sure the documents or data created by your application are easy to localise. Do not forget this last goal, as it is often overlooked. Imagine that your product is a word processor package or an HTML page editor. Did you make sure it would be easy for people to localise documents created with your product? If you are using a proprietary format to store your data, do you have a mechanism to export to and import from other formats useable for translation, like OpenTag?

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