Internationalization is a way of designing and producing products that can be easily adapted to different locales. This requires extracting all language, country/region and culturally dependent elements from a product. In other words, the process of developing an application whose feature design and code design do not make assumptions based on a single locale, and whose source code simplifies the creation of different local editions of a program, is called internationalization.
在经济学中，国际化是企业有意识的追逐国际市场的行为体现。它即包括产品国际流动，也包括生产要素的国际流动。美国学者理查德·D·罗宾逊（Richard D·Robinson）在其著作《企业国际化导论》一书中提出上述观点。在文字改革中，国际化指设计汉语拼音（文字）时采用国际通用的拉丁字母，并尽量贴近国际流行的拉丁字母的读音来安排汉语拼音（文字）字母及字母组合的发音。