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Localization and internationalization, what's the difference?

Asked 2009-02-03T11:20:02.343
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I was going to ask a question about preparing a desktop application to support multiple languages on the UI.

In my search for existing questions on the topic I was thinking the word "International", so I selected the Internationalization tag and read through some matching questions.

Eventually I realized I should probably be looking under questions tagged Localization instead. However it appears I'm not alone in getting these two terms mixed up.

So, what are they key differences between Localization and Internationalization?

Also, is a clear distinction between them really that important?

localization internationalization
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There are a few very good answers here, so I won't recycle them. However at some point, typically between internationalization testing and localization linguistic testing, internationalization and localization tend to overlap. One person mentions l10n feeding back to internationalization, but if you are doing quality i18n testing, and creating pseudo-localized content, then iterating on development issues during localization should be the exception, not the rule. Interface resizing, and particularly adapting pages to support bi-directional languages like Arabic and Hebrew also tend to blend both localization issues and internationalization engineering.

Suffice it to say, Internationalization involves making changes to the source to support any locale based on requirements. If internationalization is done well...

...Localization involves the adaptation of the content and some levels of presentation (e.g. a bold tag) so that it best addresses needs of specific targeted markets (locales).

Lots of articles & white papers for reference here: http://www.lingoport.com/software-internationalization-articles

answered 2009-02-09T20:07:02.217

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