A perfect internationalized application contains no code that is dependent on the end user's language, on the characters needed to represent the language, or on any formats such as time, date, and currency that the user expects to see and interact with. In order to minimize the cost of localizing an application (adapting it for a particular locale) the following elements should not be represented explicitly in application code:

When language- and culture-dependent information is separate from the application source code, the application does not need to be rewritten to be marketed in different countries. Instead, the only requirement is for the externalized information to be localized by translation experts.