Internationalization(i18n : representing "internationalisation" as "i" followed by 18 more letters, followed by "n") is the process of planning and implementing products and services so that they can easily be adapted to specific local languages and cultures, a process called localization. The internationalization process is sometimes called translation or localization enablement.
This is a matter not only of changing the language which the software presents (e.g. in its user interface), but of changing the date format, the orientation of the text, the numeric format, and other aspects of its behavior to reflect the culture.