12.1. What Is Internationalization?

Traditionally, software developers have focused on building applications that solve an immediate business problem. While doing so, it's easy and sometimes necessary to make assumptions about the user's language or country of residence. In many cases, these assumptions are valid and there's never a question of who the audience will be. However, if you have ever had to re-engineer an application because these assumptions weren't correct, you know how hard it can be to go back and correct the application design after the fact.

Internationalization (I18N), simply stated, is the process of designing your software ahead of time to support multiple languages and regions, so that you don't have to go back and re-engineer your applications every time a new language or country needs to be supported. An application that is said to support internationalization has the following characteristics: