Localization & Globalization

Localization

The Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) defines localization as follows:

"Localization involves taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region and language) where it will be used and sold."

Note that some publishers consider localization as an integral part of the development process of a product. In some cases, special country-specific releases of software products are called localizations.

In this book, we will refer to all localization-related activities taking place during development of the original product as internationalization.

Localization projects usually include the following activities:

• Project management
• Translation and engineering of software
• Translation, engineering, and testing of online help or web content
• Translation and desktop publishing (DTP) of documentation
• Translation and assembling of multimedia or computer-based training components
• Functionality testing of localized software or web applications

Approximately 80% of software products are localized from English into other languages because the majority of software and web applications are being developed in the United States. In addition, software manufacturers in other countries often develop their products in English, or have them localized into English first and use this version as a basis for further localization. A well-localized product enables users to interact with a software application in their native language.

They should be able to read all interface components such as error messages or screen tips in their native language, and enter information with all accented characters using the local keyboard layout. "L10n" is often used as an abbreviation for localization.

Globalization

The Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) defines globalization as follows:

"Globalization addresses the business issues associated with taking a product global. In the globalization of high-tech products this involves integrating localization throughout a

company, after proper internationalization and product design, as well as marketing, sales, and support in the world market."

Globalization is a term used in many different ways.

For example,

Firstly, geopolitical level that deals with globalization of business as an economic evolution.

Secondly, there is the globalization of an enterprise that establishes an international presence with local branch or distribution offices.

Thirdly, there is the process of creating local or localized versions of web sites, which we will refer to as "web site globalization".

Web site globalization refers to enabling a web site to deal with non- English speaking visitors, i.e. internationalizing the site’s back-end software, designing a multi-lingual architecture, and localizing the site’s static or dynamic content.

In the context of this book, globalization covers both internationalization and localization. Publishers will "go global" when they start developing, translating, marketing, and distributing their products to foreign language markets. The concept of globalization ("g11n") is typically used in a sales and marketing context, i.e. it is the process by which a company breaks free of the home markets to pursue business opportunities wherever its customers may be located.