Internationalization Best Practices (topic briefs)

Developing global revenue streams greatly diversifies a company and minimizes the risk when one market falters. Internationalization ("I18n") is a crucial step in creating a global product to sell abroad.

The following three Lionbridge Topic Briefs focus on specific strategies designed to support global product release initiatives:

Internationalization Best Practices for Numeric Formatting
Often times when people think of internationalization (i18n), they limit their scope of thought to linguistic aspects such as string externalization and concatenation, searching, and sorting. These aspects may represent the bulk of the i18n work; however, dealing with numeric formatting issues can also be very important and sometimes cause errors that silently go undetected.

Internationalization Best Practices for Date-Time Formatting
Date and time formatting issues occur in practically any software application, and there is a high probability that errors go silently undetected.

Internationalization of Data Validation and Character Processing 
Many applications contain some form of logic related to parsing or processing text entered by a user or text data received from a system interface. This logic can deal with the text value as a single element or it could attempt to process the individual characters. In either case, the logic could contain code and data specific to a certain locale that may not work internationally.