CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2013/ch1 1w18 bs

Internationalization in Rails

Introduction

In general when we start a conversation, the first default language of communication we use is English, but if the other person is not familiar with English we try and translate our dialogue in a language that the person is familiar with. Similarly whenever we write a program or a document we write it in English by default. But what if someone who is not familiar with English wants to read your program or code? The simple solution is that we translate program or code into a language that the person is familiar with. And for this, we use a term called internationalization.

Internationalization is a way by which we can view an application in various languages without actually making changes to the code of the application. This saves us a lot of time and effort, as we don’t have to write or edit the same code or document in all the copies.

Internationalization has an acronym, rather more of a numeronym ,which is i18n where the number 18 represents the number of letters between the first and last letters in the word internationalization.