National Language Support (NLS) provides a base for internationalization to allow data to be changed from one code set to another. You might need to convert text files or message catalogs. There are several standard converters for this purpose.
When a program sends data to another program residing on a remote host, the data can require conversion from the code set of the source machine to that of the receiver. For example, when communicating with an IBM VM system, the system converts its ISO8859-1 data to EBCDIC. Code sets define character and control function assignments to code points. These coded characters must be converted when a program receives data in one code set but displays it in another code set.
For more information on converters, see Converters Overview for Programming.