  InternationalisationEnglish is an international language of information technology, but the adoption of IT solutions requires them to be available in various languages. Software being Internationalized means that a program is ready for adoption in different countries and different cultures, without the need to modify it technically. This is an important focus for the CiviCRM Development Team. It has been built with international needs in mind. Another term that is commonly used in this context is localization. This is basically the process of adapting software for a specific country or language (using its internationalization capabilities) by translating text displayed on the screen and introducing different region specific settings. These settings are (among others):
There are other internationalization and localization concerns to be taken into consideration when using software.
When reading about internationalization, you might sometimes run over the cryptic i18n acronym (well, numeronym, to be strict). This term resulted from a somewhat humorous, but very convenient shortening of the long word - there is exactly 18 characters in between first and last letter of 'internationalization'. Even more humorously, given it is much shorter, the word localization is sometimes written as L10n. Let's not overlook the fact that these words are both usually spelled with a 'z' which is not a universal spelling convention in the family of "English" languages (New Zealand English, for example, would use 's'). CiviCRM was built with international users in mind and it is one of the development rules to provide ability for different language use. It is not, howver, a part of the core effort to provide translations. The project relies on its community when it comes to translating all the texts that are being displayed to a person using software.
Further ReadingInternationalization and localization
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CiviCRM translations server -