Internationalization (dubbed as I18n as there are exactly eighteen characters between the first “I” and the last “n”) means creating an application that can be adapted to various languages easily, without the need to do complex changes. This involves extracting various bits (like strings, date and currency formats) out of a (Rails) application and then providing translations and formats for them. The latter is called localization and sometimes is dubbed as L10n. If your company is growing and seeking to go international, localization is an important step to do.
