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Web globalization isn’t just about expanding into new countries; many companies now must support additional languages within their domestic markets. In the eleven minute interview with John Yunker, co-founder of Byte Level Research, we discuss his annual the benefits of web globalization for Web professionals, the annual ranking of the best global websites, the Web Globalization Report Card he’s created and how companies like Facebook are leading in web globalization and how they got there.
According to Wikipedia, in computing, internationalization and localization (other correct spellings are internationalisation and localisation) are means of adapting computer software to different languages, regional differences and technical requirements of a target market. Internationalization is the process of designing a software application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes. Localization is the process of adapting internationalized software for a specific region or language by adding locale-specific components and translating text.
The terms are frequently abbreviated to the numeronyms i18n (where 18 stands for the number of letters between the first i and last n in internationalization, a usage coined at DEC in the 1970s or 80s)[1] and L10n respectively, due to the length of the words. The capital L in L10n helps to distinguish it from the lowercase i in i18n.
Some companies, like IBM and Sun Microsystems, use the term “globalization” for the combination of internationalization and localization.
Microsoft defines Internationalization as a combination of World-Readiness and localization. World-Readiness is a developer task, which enables a product to be used with multiple scripts and cultures (globalization) and separating user interface resources in a localizable format (localizability, abbreviated to L12y).