i18n vs l10n vs g11n: What's the Difference? (Simple Guide)
A plain-English explainer for the four acronyms everyone uses interchangeably and shouldn't. Opens with the whole answer in one box: i18n is the engineering that makes a product capable of adapting, paid once and invisible to users; l10n is adapting it for one specific market, paid again for every market and every release; t9n is the words inside l10n, the only piece you can buy as a commodity; g11n is the business strategy that decides any of it is worth doing. Explains why there are numbers in the middle of the words, then frames internationalization as the work of removing assumptions — that text lives in the code, that adding an s makes a plural, that a comma separates thousands, that names have a first and a last — with the eight that cost the most. Covers everything localization includes beyond words (formats, tone and formality, imagery, colour meaning, payment methods, tax display, support hours), and the translation-versus-localization gap through four launches where the translator did their job correctly and the message was still wrong. Plus a nesting diagram, the order the four happen in and why swapping two of them forks your codebase, one inbox line walked through all four, a role-by-role ownership table that names the missing in-market reviewer, six confusions with what each one actually costs, a self-test for which one is your job, and a glossary of every neighbouring acronym from TMS and TM to CLDR and BCP 47.