Introduction to Internationalization and Localization

Wel­come to the course! 

This video is an overview of what inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion (i18n) and local­iza­tion (l10n) mean in the con­text of Craft CMS, and what top­ics we will cov­er in this course.

Inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion is the process of prepar­ing your Craft CMS project for an inter­na­tion­al audi­ence by struc­tur­ing it in a way that sup­ports mul­ti­ple lan­guages and regions. Local­iza­tion then takes that foun­da­tion and adapts the project to spe­cif­ic tar­get audi­ences. These two con­cepts are com­mon­ly abbre­vi­at­ed as i18n and l10n, where the num­bers rep­re­sent the count of let­ters between the first and last char­ac­ters of each word.

Key Take­aways #

• Inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion (i18n) is about prepar­ing your project struc­ture to sup­port mul­ti­ple lan­guages; local­iza­tion (l10n) is about adapt­ing con­tent for spe­cif­ic regions
• The abbre­vi­a­tions i18n and l10n appear through­out the Craft CMS source code and are stan­dard indus­try terms
• This guide cov­ers date for­mat­ting, num­ber and cur­ren­cy for­mat­ting, mes­sage trans­la­tion with place­hold­ers, cus­tom trans­la­tion cat­e­gories, and con­trol pan­el translations
• Even sin­gle-lan­guage sites ben­e­fit from adopt­ing inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion prac­tices ear­ly to reduce future refactoring