Quick Tips for Web Internationalization

In many of our projects we stumble over a series of technical issues in the source text/code we try to fix before the first words get translated in order to avoid re-adjustments later on once translation teams are on board and the project is running.

This part is commonly called internationalization (or i18n which stands for the 18 letters between the first and the last of this word). I18n of software is the way a software should be prepared in order to enable its translation in different languages and the successful localization (=L10n) to local target audiences.

Internationalization is nothing new and fortunately there is already a lot of written information about this topic out there in the web. One of the best places to get started is the W3C website about Internationalization and Localization.