Internationalized software must enable easy porting to other locales. A locale defines language and specific cultural conventions. The process of adjusting internationalized software to a particular locale is called localization (a common acronym for this term is L10N). You can think of software internationalization as a prerequisite for localization. Localization consists of more than just translating the user interface. Consider North America and Britain, for instance. Seemingly, they use the same language. However, not only do these locales differ in spelling (program vs. programme, realize vs. realise, color vs. colour etc.), certain cultural conventions such date formatting (in Europe the date format is DDMMYYY whereas in north America it's MMDDYYYY), currency, and measurement system. Other locales exhibit additional cultural differences. In Germany and other European countries, the sign of a decimal fraction (also called radix) is a comma, e.g., 10,5. In North America, the radix is called "decimal point", and as the name suggests, it's represented as follows: 10.5.
Locales use different character codesets (7-bit ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode) and fonts (Latin, Hebrew, Cyrillic). There are a few basic guidelines to follow in order to ensure easy software localization:
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