Internationalization

Internationalization (I18N) is the preparation necessary for cost effective localization

It is the process of planning, designing and implementing a "culturally and technically" neutral product, which can easily be localized for a specific culture or cultures. Internationalization will help you decrease localization cost and speed up time-to-market by addressing crucial technical, aesthetic, cultural, and linguistic issues at project start-up. Let us save you time and money by performing an internationalization assessment to determine your product's readiness for localization, or by internationalizing your product for you.

When is the light bulb not a good idea?

Idioms, dates, numbers, icons, and symbols are culture specific (for example, a light bulb is not necessarily recognized as a symbol for an idea in other countries, as it is in the United States). Internationalization helps to identify these issues and accommodate the differences to save you money during the localization process.

The following are some examples of critical issues we address during internationalization:

• Text often "expands" when translated from English into other languages.
  We allow extra space in user interfaces (for example, hardware labels, help pages, and online menus) to accommodate the increased number of characters in the translation.
• Some products do not support foreign languages.
  We use tools that support international character sets, including Unicode.
• Multi-byte languages such as Asian languages use ideographs in addition to alphabetical systems. Programs written to support characters in a single byte are double-byte enabled or written in Unicode to handle languages with characters that require two or more bytes per character.
• Languages such as Hebrew and Arabic are written predominantly right-to-left, whereas numbers are generally written from left-to-right.
  We adapt the layout for these "bi-directional" reading audiences.

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"Language Intelligence's staff ask lots of questions and it's great because it shows me that they care about their clients and their projects and want to do a good job"

Michael Kelly
Sen. Globalization Project Man.
GlobalSight, Inc.