Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, Second Edition

Creating International Perl Scripts

Internationalization, sometimes called I18N, is the process of generalizing a script or program so that it can be easily moved or translated into a different language or dialect. Localization, L10N, is the process of taking the internationalized version of a script and making it work in a specific language. Some internationalization can be done in core Perl—extracting all the text strings that a script uses, for example, to allow those to be translated without mucking with the core code. Other things—working with character sets other than English's A to Z, using sorting (collating) systems other than simple A to Z, and formatting numbers—can be controlled through the use of Perl's local module.

For more information ...