Key terms and concepts(refers https://classroom.udacity.com/courses/ud610/lessons/b109054b-fcd4-49e7-b806-61516f99eae3/concepts/12578479-5ac8-445a-a97f-e953ee58ed28)
Like many professions, localization as a subject contains some vocabulary you should be aware of. Throughout the course, you’ll be learning new vocabulary. We’ve created a glossary where you can review all key terms and concepts presented in this course. In particular, there are a few key terms you should know the definitions of before continuing. They are part of the glossary and also described below:
Globalization (g11n):
In the context of businesses and localization, "Globalization” refers to the way companies plan and implement strategies to be competitive around the world.
According to Localization Industry Standards Association (or shortly LISA):
“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. (LISA definition, cit. Esselink 2000: 4)”
If you want to launch your product worldwide, you have to make it ready to succeed in each different part of the world.
This is where globalization comes in. Companies organize so they can more easily develop, refine and launch products anywhere in the world and in any language. Globalization is not a process, but rather refers to a state of a company when it is ready to offer products and services globally.
Internationalization (i18n):
“Internationalization” refers to foreseeing the challenges of developing a product for multiple countries and preparing the first version of the product for these challenges. For a technology product, this usually involves the software engineers understanding how to build a localized product. As defined by LISA:
“Internationalization is the process of generalizing a product so that it can handle multiple languages and cultural conventions without the need for re-design. (LISA definition, cit. Esselink 2000: 2)”
Since "internationalization" is a long word, both when written and spoken, it is often abbreviated to "i18n"(pronounced “i-18-n”), because there are 18 characters between the "i" and the "n".
When internationalization is done effectively, companies save time and money, and often offer products better-tailored to the users in each country.
Examples of Internationalization
What does internationalization look like? Let’s look at a few examples.
Internationalization efforts for Google Fit may include using the correct character encoding, basically the correct alphabet, that will enable Chinese characters, special Turkish characters, etc. to be properly displayed on your phone’s screen. Here is an example of what this might look like (with broken characters) if you localized something in Turkish without doing this correctly:
Here is the same example if the app is “internationalized” and supports the special characters of the localization language.
Another example is the way various countries write their date and time. Each of the following means something different, depending on where you are:
- 03/04/14 — Fourth of March in the US, and third of April in Italy
- 03.04.14 — Date in German, but can be mistaken for the time 3pm, 4 minutes and 14 seconds in Turkish
So, in our products, developers write the code for date and time so it is adaptable across languages.
- 2014-03-04 — Unambiguously the 4th of March, 2014, using the ISO 8601 international standard
Internationalization teams in tech companies work to minimize potential errors (like the date and time formatting) before a product is actually developed. They validate and design for formats and details that vary across countries and locales. In short, internationalization is the process of preparing your product to adapt to languages and conventions across locales.
Localization (l10n):
Localization refers to the actual process of converting software or technology products from one language to another, for example translating a product’s English source text into German, French, Swahili, Tagalog, or any other language. A key point here is that the translation has a culturally and locally appropriate style and tone.
Localization Industry Standards Association defines “localization” as : “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. (cit. Esselink 2000: 3)”
Similar to how “internationalization” is abbreviated “i18n,” “localization” is easier to write as “l10n” because there are 10 characters between l and n.
Examples of Localization
Let’s take Google Fit as an example again. A localized Google Fit app looks like this compared to the original English version:
A localized Google Fit app in English, Hindi, and Japanese.
As you can see, it’s not just the text that has been translated. The app uses different colors and graphics depending on what locale it has been localized for. The Japanese version of the app includes skiing and swimming, while the English version of the app shows karate and yoga poses.
Globalization vs. Internationalization vs. Localization
Since these three terms are related, it’s easy to confuse them. Internationalization is a process that takes place before localization. The goal is to make the product easy to localize by engineering the product in a way that can accommodate multiple languages and cultures, such as with the date formatting example given above. Localization, on the other hand, is the act of actually translating the content to fit a certain locale.
Globalization is different from both Localization and Internationalization. Globalization is a marketing strategy to do business in and offer products in international markets. Let’s take Google Fit as an example. When the Google Fit team decides to go global and get the app localized into other languages, they prepare a sizable marketing and business budget. They may also develop strategies to compete with local apps in the markets the Google Fit team wants to enter. All of these strategies fall under the umbrella of “Globalization”.
Translation (t9n):
Translation is converting the meaning from one language to another and refers to written text form. Translation is only a part of the whole localization process as localization also involves adapting date and time formats, changing currencies, cultural appropriation, changing the design and the way user experience a product and complying with local laws and regulations.
Locale:
In the localization industry, locale refers to the linguistic, cultural and other requirements of a specific target market. For example, there are different locales for the English language and each is represented with a different locale code. En-US is for locales where American English is spoken while en-GB is for locales where British English is spoken. Similarly, zh-CN and zh-TW are for simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese (Taiwan).
