Quote:

I have to say this is the laziest and least informative way to abbreviate a term I have ever encountered. I suspect it is not so much an abbreviation as a shibboleth.



I had to look up shibboleth, an act which may or may not have involved irony. Anyway, I think the terms L10n and i18n are jargon, not meant to be informative abbreviations at all. I suspect that in situations where internationalization and localization are issues, employees have to use the words frequently in office memos. They get tired of typing the word out, so they invented i18n as a stand-in.

If they use Microsoft Word, and I'm sure many do, they could easily have MSW type it out for them. Just as MSW can auto-correct common types like the dreaded "teh," it can be made to auto "corect" short hand words into longer ones. I use this feature extensively, so that when typing on my home or office computer I can type stuff like "a/w" and it gets changed to "associated with" in the blink of an eye.