Internationalisation & Localisation
If you visit the W3C‘s International page, you’ll come across the term ‘Internationalisation’, which is basically about making it…
…possible to use Web technologies with different languages, scripts, and cultures.W3C
However, because the term ‘internationalisation’ is a long word, many developers, designers, bloggers and suchlike can’t be bothered to write it out in full each time. Instead they use the term I18n.
The ‘I’ and the ‘n’ are left as the first and last letters, and the ’18′ indicates that 18 characters are replaced from the middle. This is meant to be more straight forward, yet actually means that the term I18n is actually completely incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t already sufficiently familiar with the concept to know that this used as an abbreviation for it.
You’ll also find L10n (localisation) used and even most bizarrely, despite the concept including making things easier to understand, you’ll find people using the term a11y to represent ‘accessibility’.
The whole thing leads to titles like this:
A11Y and I18N testing of Java based GUIs
…which frankly we can all do without.
The time has come to stop the jargon: there is enough jargon thrown around in computing these days without creating more. It just gives the impression that you specifically want computing to be some sort of esoteric discipline that mere mortals shouldn’t expect to understand.
Most importantly, it makes us all come across like a bunch of w5s.
Joe Dolson says:
July 19th, 2007 at 2:11 am
Y2h, t2t k2d of t3g r4y g2s on my f5g n4s.
T4s f1r t2s, J2k! N2e p2t.
God, I can’t write like that any more…
jesstech says:
July 19th, 2007 at 4:03 am
I had no idea this was going on, even despite running across ‘l10n’ a few times before. I had never bothered to look it up, and suffice it to say I was certainly confused.
It actually makes me *sick*. Sometimes I fear we are regressing as a species.
JackP says:
July 19th, 2007 at 6:57 am
@Joe: frighteneningly, I managed to decipher that
Rich Pedley says:
July 19th, 2007 at 9:12 am
Interesting post, though surely W3C are to blame. Even the shortening of their name is of a similar ilk.
Aaron Bassett says:
July 19th, 2007 at 11:43 am
As incomprehensible as the modern tech world can be to outsiders I still much prefer its method of communication and abbreviation to that of “txt spk”.
Ok I know that writing u instead of you saves 6 presses on a numeric keypad and a whole 2 characters….but come on! How long have we had predictive text? And message size limits are not a problem anymore as we can create SMS which span multiple messages and almost everyone has free or unlimited texts with their call plans.
And don’t even get me started on l33t sp34k
Joe Dolson says:
July 19th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Yep, that’s frightening. The long words are harder than the short ones, though…
Ian says:
July 20th, 2007 at 2:08 am
While struggling through a Plone installation and customization at my day job, I was exposed to this i18n and l10n b6t. Thanks for the post and the laugh!
maaike says:
July 20th, 2007 at 11:47 am
You are *so* right. And for us non-native speakers it’s even harder!
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