Internationalization helps the localization process in many ways:

When localizing into languages such as Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew, localization encounters a new set of problems. All of these languages have alphabets and characters that are not represented by the English alphabet. As a result the internationalization industry created the Unicode Character Standard to uniquely identify all possible characters in target languages.

• Allows for multilingual text using any or all the languages you desire. Invoice or ticketing applications can print customer information in their native languages from a single database.
  
• Having just one way to process text reduces development and support costs, improves time-to-market, and allows for single version of source code. Thus, one version of the product can be used worldwide. Separate releases for regional markets are eliminated.
  
• Standards ensure interoperability and portability by prescribing conformant behavior. Applications are able to process text consistently and conformance is verifiable.
  
• Text in any language can be exchanged worldwide. This eliminates data corruption and other problems due to incompatible code pages or missing conversion tables.
  
• Support of Unicode by all modern technologies extends application life and broadens integration possibilities. Applications supporting Unicode may take advantage of new technologies and integrate with other applications.
  
• Widespread industry support provides platform and vendor independence. Microsoft, HP, IBM, Sun, Unisys operating systems, Oracle, Microsoft, Progress databases, and many others support Unicode.
  
• Practical and apolitical design is ensured due to the diverse and international, membership to the Unicode? Consortium. Adopters of the Unicode convention cross all industry boundaries.
  
• Easy conversion from legacy code pages. Unicode's comprehensive character set is a superset of existing code pages. There are even cross mapping tables for a localization specialist's reference.
  
• Internet-ready for use in E-business. Internet standards, such as XML, Perl, Java and JavaScript are Unicode-based.
  
• Continuous evolution extends application lifetime and expands capabilities to meet future needs. Unicode Version 4.0 supports all modern languages, including 96,000+ characters.
• Coding to allowing for bi-directional language localization

Text written in languages such as Arabic and Hebrew read from right to left. These languages are referred to as bidirectional languages. However, though the text is written from right to left, the numbers are generally written left to right. Additionally, if there are other languages such as English included in the product or software, these retain their original left to right orientation.

This can cause many problems when localizing software. Essentially, user interfaces and report layouts that are originally designed for a left-to-right audience and are being localized for Middle Eastern markets, should be mirror imaged, that is the information on the left should be swapped to the right and vice versa. The direction of writing influences how information should be placed on the screen and in reports. For left to right (LTR) languages, the most important information is usually placed in the upper-left and the least important in the lower right. This is because the eye begins scanning in the upper left and will therefore see that information first. However, right-to-left readers will start scanning in the upper right and the most important information should therefore be placed there. Coding that allows mirror imaging to be accomplished quickly and easily is part of the internationalization process.