An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label that is displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in a language- specific script or alphabet, such as Chinese, Russian or the Latin-based languages with diacritics, such as French. These writing systems are encoded by computers in multi-byte Unicode. Internationalized domain names are stored in the Domain Name System as ASCII strings using Punycode transcription.The Domain Name System, which performs a lookup service to translate user-friendly names into network addresses for locating Internet resources, is restricted to the use of ASCII characters, a technical limitation that initially set the standard for acceptable domain names. The internationalization of domain names is a technical solution to translate names written in language-native scripts into an ASCII text representation that is compatible with the Domain Name System.