Localization happens mostly in content creation (both long-form copy and microcopy) and management. Internationalization can happen across the whole website stack from HTML, CSS, and JS to design considerations and build systems. Localization, on the other hand, is about actually adapting the software for those languages and regions. Internationalization is all about how, in our case, software, gets designed so that it can be adapted for multiple languages and regions without needing engineering changes. Internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) are two sides of the same coin. Getting these sometimes conflicting set of needs right is the heart of what it takes to internationalize codebases and localize sites. Our content creators needed to be able to focus on creating content, and our translators on translating content, with as little work as possible to get their work into the site and deployed. Making sure that our codebase could support multiple locales (language, region, or combination of the two) without needing to custom-code each one, while allowing translation to be done with as little of that system’s knowledge as possible, would be critical to making this happen. When building out v, we knew that we needed to make it available to a global audience. It can all be done, though, but it takes planning. Doing all of this with a static site generator, like Eleventy, can make it even harder, because you may not have a database, nonetheless a server. Your content needs to be structured, down to the microcopy in your UI and the format of your dates, to be adaptable to any language you throw at it. Your UI needs to be responsive, not just to screen size, but to different languages and writing modes. You need to be able to support not just different languages, but different regions with the same language. You need a strategy to determine what localization to send, and code to do it. Internationalization and localization is more than just writing your content in multiple languages.
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