I18n terms
Software that speaks every language your users do
Internationalisation ensures your software can be adapted for any language, region, or culture without engineering rework. This category covers locale handling, Unicode, pluralisation rules, date and number formatting, right-to-left layouts, translation workflows, and the subtle bugs that appear when you assume everyone uses your date format, currency, or alphabet.
🧠 Logic graph · i18n
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- Character Encoding Often seen in PHP Intl Extension 1d
Bidirectional Text (BiDi)
The handling of text that mixes left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL) scripts in the same document — governed by the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, with CSS and HTML direction attributes controlling display.
2mo ago
i18n intermediate
Collation & Locale-Aware Sorting
PHP 7.0+
Locale-specific rules for ordering strings alphabetically — determining that ä sorts near a in German but after z in traditional Swedish, and that sorting must not rely on byte values for Unicode text.
2mo ago
i18n intermediate
ICU Message Format
PHP 7.0+
A standard syntax for translatable strings that handles pluralisation, gender, number formatting, and date formatting in a single expression — supported by PHP's intl extension via MessageFormatter.
2mo ago
i18n intermediate
Pluralisation Rules
PHP 7.0+
Language-specific rules governing how word forms change based on quantity — English has two forms (1 item / 2 items), but many languages have three, four, or six distinct plural forms requiring different translations.
2mo ago
i18n intermediate
Character Encoding
PHP 5.0+
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How text is stored as bytes — ASCII (128 chars), Latin-1 (256 chars), UTF-8 (1-4 bytes, backwards compatible), and UTF-16 are the key encodings developers encounter.
3mo ago
i18n intermediate
PHP Intl Extension
PHP 5.3+
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PHP's built-in internationalisation extension wrapping ICU — MessageFormatter, Collator, NumberFormatter, DateFormatter, and Normalizer for correct multilingual handling.
3mo ago
i18n intermediate
Pluralisation Rules Across Languages
PHP 5.3+
Different languages have different plural forms — English has two (one/other), Arabic has six, Russian has three — gettext and ICU MessageFormat handle this correctly.
3mo ago
i18n intermediate
Translation Management
PHP 5.0+
Organising, extracting, and synchronising translatable strings — gettext .po/.mo files, ICU MessageFormat, and tools like Weblate or Crowdin for translator workflows.
3mo ago
i18n intermediate
Locale-Aware Formatting
PHP 5.3+
Formatting numbers, currencies, and dates according to locale conventions — 1,234.56 in en-US is 1.234,56 in de-DE, and currency symbols and date formats vary by locale.
3mo ago
i18n intermediate
Right-to-Left Language Support
HTML5
Design and implementation considerations for RTL languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu) — text direction, mirrored layouts, and bidirectional text handling.
3mo ago
i18n intermediate
Timezone Handling
PHP 5.0+ Storing dates as UTC and converting to local timezones only for display — prevents DST bugs, ambiguous times, and incorrect date arithmetic.
3mo ago
i18n intermediate
Unicode Fundamentals
PHP 5.0+
Unicode assigns every character a code point — UTF-8 encodes these as 1-4 bytes, making it the universal encoding for text on the web.
3mo ago
i18n intermediate