Internationalization (I18N) is the preparation of your product to support multiple languages and locales. Many Web sites, Applications or Devices are developed with one language in mind. Before localizing, the product needs to be re-engineering – internationalized.

The most common aspects of internationalization are:

• Separation of the text from the application itself
• UI resizing to allow for languages with longer strings to fit
• Support for bi-directional languages such as Arabic
• Support for Unicode to allow foreign character sets
• Support for foreign date/time formats, calendars, decimal and thousand separators, currencies, units of measure

Internationalization is better done during the design phase of the product. Additional code is added to detect language and locale automatically, switch language on the fly. Bi-directional UI is the most complex feature as the entire UI changes direction (elements on the left go to the right and vice versa) while the order of elements in sentences is left-to-right with western elements and western numbers being right-to-left.

Once the product is internationalized, Localization (L10N) is the adaptation to a local market. Localization is most often supported by complex processes involving teams worldwide as well as specific technology solutions to manage language assets, version control, multilanguage operating systems and language environments

BQT offers consulting to train your team on all aspects of Internationalization and Localizations. We can also advice you in implementing tools and designing processes.