As you’ve surely noticed, the Web has become one of the main tools for selling products. But it is also essential to keep in mind that this medium of selling and promoting works with a readership that is very diverse and located in different cultural settings.
The information that the user can read is composed of different parts that must function properly together in any country and in any language.
Internationalization, also known as I18N (because the word begins with “i” ends with “n” and there are 18 letters in between), is the process through which websites are designed to be adapted to any language without the need for code changes. The internationalization process allows for use of different languages and cultural parameters, such as different formats for dates and times. Also included in the process of internationalization is the ability to expand text originally written in English.
As Spanish translators, we often realize that our translation should be done with a “character limit”, i.e. the characters of our Spanish translation characters can not exceed the original document in English, because the website we are translating does not allow for more characters than the original document in English. Internationalization is exactly the solution to this problem.
(Spanish version: https://www.trustedtranslations.com/internacionalizacion-2011-01-27.html)
