Modern user-facing operating systems need to support users across a variety of regions, languages, and cultures. Localization and internationalization are critical to this goal.
Localization (L10N) is the process of translating user interfaces into local languages and conventions. This includes text and image content, fonts, regional variations for components like date, time, text and imagery direction, currency, and number formats.
Internationalization (I18N) is the process of designing locale-independent software that makes localization in a wide range of languages, regions, and cultures easy.
Typically, localization refers to the work done by language experts, designers, tech writers, and other content producers. Internationalization refers to the work done by software engineers.
Because Fuchsia is designed to be extensible and to flexibly support a variety of runtimes and target products, the core operating system does not strictly specify how to implement i18n and l10n.
However, Fuchsia does include some basic conventions, shared libraries, and services for i18n/l10n, and uses these in the components and runners that are typically distributed with Fuchsia. For more information, see the Internationalization section in the Development guides.
