Internationalization, often shortened to “i18n”, is the practice of designing a system in such a way that it can easily be adapted for different target audiences, that may vary in region, language, or culture.

The complementary process of adapting a system for a specific target audience is called .

Among other things, internationalization covers adapting to differences in:

• writing systems

• units of measure (currency, °C/°F, km/miles, etc.)

• time and date formats

• keyboard layouts

The work of the Unicode Consortium is a fundamental part of internationalization. Unicode supports not only variations among the world’s writing systems but also cultural variations such as currencies and time/date formats.

See also

Related glossary terms:

• W3C Internationalization Activity

• Unicode Consortium

• JavaScript Internationalization API