nyerm

While following a few links from Slashdot, I ran across an Introduction to i18n, which contains some freakish abbreviations:

i18n internationalization, or support for English and one other language

l10n localization, or support for many languages, but only support for English and one other, specific language at the same time

m17n multilingualization, or support for many languages at the same time

I’ve been dealing with “i18n”, “l10n”, and “m17n” issues for years, on both software and documentation projects, but I’d never run across these bizarrely-formed acronyms before. I admire their terseness, but they’re extremely obtuse, like some kind of bad hax0r speak, or maybe line noise.