Most objects that a user or a developer sees are unchanged by internationalization including command names and flags, subcommands in shells and other applications, keyboard input to programs, keywords in C programs, filenames for all system-provided files in an implementation, node names in a network. English names are still used for most of these objects. The purpose of the internationalization effort (according to POSIX.2) is to "Remove the ASCII and English bias" from computer interfaces.

NLS - same as National Language Support. The term is now obsolete.

ILS - same as International Language Support. The term is now obsolete.

I18N - Pronounced "I eighteen N", same as Internationalization. Derived from the first and last letters of the word "internationalization" and the eighteen letters in between.

national language support - set of library functions, kernel enhancements, new utilities, and modifications to existing utilities, which are designed to implement and support developers and users of I18N.

international language support - same as national language support.

internationalization - process by which a program is internationalized.

internationalized program - program which supports run-time selection of the locale. In this case, the locale determines the codeset for the representation of strings and the behavior of the program with respect to character classification, character collation, regular expressions, the language of all text presented to the user, and written cultural conventions for numeric and monetary quantities and dates and times.

fully internationalized program - an internationalized program which, in particular, supports both Asian and European locales, and may include support for right-to-left languages and top-to-bottom languages. In addition, support for locale-dependent bitmaps and other less common features may be expected.

I18N'd - same as internationalized.

locale-dependent - said of something whose behavior depends of the locale.

locale-independent - something which is not locale-dependent.

locale-neutral - said of a program which has not been internationalized.

By 1993, the projected U.S. software market is $26.4G. The projected Japanese software market for 1993 is $7.45G. The projected European software market is $25.9G. (Courtesy IDC).

For historical reasons, UNIX is much more important relative to other operating systems in Europe and Japan than it is in the U.S.

hanzi - the Chinese ideographic system containing 150,000 characters.

alphabet - phonetically based writing system.

Standard phonetic systems exist for Japanese and Korean.

pinyin - phonetic writing system proposed for Chinese, not well accepted.

cultural conventions - conventions for writing dates, times, numeric, and monetary values.

language conventions - conventions for character semantics such as German sharp s and Spanish ch.