Being the localization manager for Nokia Maps in Berlin for the last 2 years I wanted to start this Blog explaining what Localization is. I will use my Masters Thesis introduction do describe it :) :).

“The biggest mistake is for people to think that localization is just taking a product and translating it” (Kubo: 2005). Localization is in fact more than that; localization involves more than just translation. Software localization is all the process of adapting software to certain culture and language.

There are several details to take into account. Some of the most common “issues” that need to be taken into consideration are date format, currency, addressee’s format, colours, graphics, etc. Colours and graphics are quite important but sometimes companies do not give too much importance to these aspects like they should; as an example in western countries red means alarm, white is pure, black means sombreness, for other hand in Asian cultures, red is joy, white express mourning and black represents luck (Collins:2001).

When a product is created, the localization part needs to be taken into consideration; otherwise the costs will be quite high. If the product will be sold in other countries these activities need to be well thought beforehand. (Downey: 2004). This is the reason why the first step for effective localization is to do the internationalization part.

Percy (2010) defines internationalization as the process of creating software that can be easily adapted to other countries. Localizing software that was not internationalized can be a difficult task. There are several issues that can make the localization part difficult if not well planned. Just an example, Arabic and Hebrew languages are different than western languages; these languages are called right to left languages, this means the reader starts to read from right to left instead of left to right like in western languages. In a software implementation point of view this means that all the software architecture needs to handle this. Another example could be the size of Japanese or Hindi characters; normal western characters use one byte of memory, but in order to localise the application in Japanese or Hindi, the application needs to support two bytes for each character. These are small examples to illustrate how costly it can be when localization is not well planned in the beginning of the development.

Internationalization should not be treated as a feature. Internationalization should be part of the product architecture. Engineering team should be deeply involved with localization team to make sure that all technical decisions will not have any impact when there is a need to adapt the product to other cultures or countries. If internationalization is treated as just a feature, it means its priority can be negotiated, with possibility to make the priority low. On the other hand, if internationalization is part of the architecture, it means that will define how products are designed and built. (Kuba 2005)

Please comment and give me your feedback about this :)

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Thanks guys,
Luis