I have never understood what l10n stands for, nor i18n, nor m4 for that matter. But reading a good online book about autotools, there are a couple of words explaining that in fact m4 stands for Macro, which is m+4 chars. l10n is localization written as  “l+strlen(ocalizatio)+n”. Fun. Since I was on vacations while I read this, I had time to write a bash script to do this automatically while enhancing my bash skills. Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash

STRING=$1
STRLEN=${#STRING}

A=${STRING:1:$STRLEN-2}
echo ${STRING:0:1}${#A}${STRING:$STRLEN-1:$STRLEN-1}

Try running internationalization on it.