What is the best API for software i18n?

Software internationalization (known as i18n) is the process of preparing software for localization and translation. Engineers and software developers are in charge of optimizing the software to implement translations from other languages. 👨‍💻

🌐 Internationalization is concerned not simply with making the software adaptable for other languages but also adapting it for different data formats, settings, interfaces, and local customs. For achieving this, four points are essential:

• Appropriate design and development. Developers should prepare the website to present no challenges to localization. Some examples are: ensuring legacy character encoding is done correctly, allowing Unicode, concatenating strings properly, utilizing less code for user-interface string values, etc.
• Supporting features needed only for localization. Some elements should be implemented even if they’re not used for other processes besides localization. Such features include adding CSS support for non-Latin typographic or vertical text and DTD for bidirectional text support and language identification.
• Preparing code to display local data formats. Developers should identify patterns of data formats from previous localization data, libraries, or users’ responses. This assists in showing addresses, names, local calendars, and numbers, among other details, in a familiar format for users.
• Separation of localizable elements. Localizable features should be implemented, but developers must ensure they aren’t displayed unexpectedly when not needed. For this, it’s best to distinguish these elements beforehand in the source code to trigger them only when needed.

🤔 For instance, postcodes and ZIP codes have different formats depending on the country. In a Canadian version of the site, postcodes are presented in X0X 0X0 format (X - letter and 0 - number). The UK version has X00 0XX format, and the Brazilian version is 00000-000.

Not paying attention to these features could prevent users from placing orders from their country. Internationalization takes care of such distinctions.

Localazy API is prepared to handle adequately internationalized projects with multiple locales, and with the API, developers can automate the following l10n and translation process for multilingual adaptation of each feature. 😎