“A large body of standards has evolved to handle the
problems with text manipulation… In general, ad hoc handling
methods are considered to be localization, while a method that
conforms to some standard and is generalizable to many cultural
environments is considered internationalization.” — Article
by Stephen Turnbull.
“Currently, the central standard for internationalization is the
locale model of POSIX. Unfortunately, in the current state of the
art, localization via the POSIX model is something of a Procrustean
bed. For example, in Japanese there are two common ways of notating
the currency unit yen: postfixing ¥ and prefixing ¥. It is
not uncommon for both conventions to be used in the same document
in different contexts: the former is common in running text, the
latter in tables. POSIX does not provide for this.”
“These two articles have presented an overview of the principles
of internationalization. It hasn’t been brief, but it is hardly
complete or comprehensive. Linux is now in fairly good shape with
respect to the basic facilities for internationalization with the
wide dissemination of GNU libc version 2 (usually known on Linux
systems as glibc or libc6).”