Globalization (or Internationalization)

In IT industry, Globalization is also known as Internationalization. Globalization is the process of making a product multi-lingual or in multiple cultures/locales. It is the process of designing and developing a software system in such a way that it can be easily adapted to multiple culture and locales/languages. In other words, a system which can be adapted any culture or locale/language called as Globalization or it is the process ready to support in any languages or any locale . Globalization may not translate any system instead it will tell us to develop a system which can be translated.

For example - lets say we have a label in ASP.NET page, which will display the date and time:

<asp:Label ID="lblDateTimeDisplay" runat="server" />

Now, the value of current date is set as

lblDateTimeDisplay.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString("dd-MMM-yyyy");

In the above mentioned value of label is not globalized because it will always display date and time in  "dd-MMM-yyyy" format in every culture or locales. To make this label globalized, we can assign globalized value to label like this way:

lblDateTimeDisplay.Text = DateTime.Now.ToShortDateString();

Now, value of label will display in the format as per selected culture by user like mm/dd/yyyy for en-US etc.

So that, for globalization all the static content should be converted with label.

Localization

The actual translating is called as Localization. Localization means that adapting your application to specific languages by translating. Localization is the process of translating/customizing an application. So that it will be available for local client. In other words, Localization is the process of translating  an application resources into localized versions for each culture that the application will support.

Localization works with the feature provided by Microsoft i.e. resource file which may available either in App_LocalResources folder or App_GlobalResources folder. The main difference is that LocalResources folder contains resources which apply for one page or user control only. The syntax for local resource file is

<asp:Label ID="lblDateTimeDisplay" runat="server" meta:resourcekey="[ResourceKey]" />

While resources in GlobalResources are accessible in the whole application and the syntax for global resource file is

<asp:Label ID="lblHeading" runat="server" Text="<%$ Resources:[ResourceFileName],[ResourceKey] %>" />