

Origin Of The Abbreviation I18n For "Internationalization" - youngerdryas
http://www.i18nguy.com/origini18n.html

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mwcampbell
What's striking to me is that we have the abbreviation "i18n" for
internationalization, and "a11y" for accessibility. From the perspective of a
typical young American software development team, these are two instances of
"making software work for those other people that aren't quite like us". Is it
a coincidence that (1) both of these concepts got cumbersome words, and (2)
both of these words were abbreviated in the same way?

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lobster_johnson
I think you're reading too much into it. "i18n" exists because, frankly, it's
too long; it's a 20-letter word, one of the longest in common usage, and it's
boring and time-consuming to type, and easy to mistype.

There is a long tradition in hacker culture to shorten and optimize things
whenever possible, going back to the early days of Unix and C ("sh" for shell,
"rm" for remove and so on). The reason i18n has a number is that it's awkward
to abbreviate without; the C/Unix-style tradition of removing vowels to
abbreviate would render it unreadable ("intrntnlztn"? "intrlzn"?).

Case in point: One of the companies I co-founded, Transparensee, has a very
long name. Internally we started referring to it as _t11e_ everywhere,
including the domain names we use for dev stuff (t11e.com works as an alias
for transparensee.com).

Edit: We also have l10n (localization) and m17n (multilingualization),
incidentally.

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hackmiester
I feel like "intl" would be a good abbreviation.

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lobster_johnson
That just means "international", which does not capture the essence of what it
is. It would have to be something "intlzn". But since we already have
established i18n, there is no need to coin a new abbreviation.

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franze
didn't know that. one of my customers mentioned one day we should shorten our
email to f19n.com, we thought it was a great idea, since then we use f19n.com
as our email domain.

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rikacomet
from a hacker's perspective, Internationalization is a old word now. You
either code for all platforms, or you code for specific
people/platforms/needs.

 __Busted! __

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mpyne
What the hell is i18n other than "coding for all platforms"?

i18n is making the software _capable of being localized_ at all. l10n
("localization") is the process of actually localizing to a specific given
locale (which is more than mere translation, btw).

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rikacomet
it is different from the translation meaning? something like the problem of
japanese games not working on english based plateforms, without the locales
being changed to the former?

~~~
lobster_johnson
Localization is all the stuff not covered by translation: Time and date
formats, for example. And also any aspect that must be tailored to a location.
For example, if a game contains graphics that satirizes something American
(like a restaurant chain or a sports brand), region-specific graphics may be
modified to suit the region.

