Localization and internationalization, what's the difference?

Question

I was going to ask a question about preparing a desktop application to support multiple languages on the UI.

In my search for existing questions on the topic I was

Answer 1

According to Wikipedia

Internationalization is the process of designing a software application so that it can potentially be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes.

Localization is the process of adapting internationalized software for a specific region or language by adding locale-specific components and translating text.

Also, Localization (which is potentially performed multiple times, for different locales) uses the infrastructure or flexibility provided by internationalization (which is ideally performed only once, or as an integral part of ongoing development).

Answer 2

There are many definitions of i18n and l10n. The one I use are :

internationalization (i18n) : language specific adaptation of your application (translation)

localization (l10n) : locale specific adaptation of your application (money, number format, date format ...).

For example, we can have the same language for an application distributed in France and in Switzerland (we both speak french, at least in some parts of Switzerland), but we will still need some adaptation to change EUR to CHF.

Answer 3

I feel localization can go without internationalization but.. internationalization with localization should not be done...