Today we’re beginning a new series of guest posts from Marta about i18n and l10n in the software industry. Enjoy! – Dario Solera

Newbies in translation and localization industry may be fascinated – or scared – by the terms pros use, like localization (or localisation in British English), globalization, internationalization etc. What exactly do these fancy terms mean and how are they different? Let’s have a look.

First goes the most general one – translation. Translation is the process of conveying a text from one language into another.

Localization (commonly abbreviated as l10n, first and last characters of the word plus 10 characters between them) means not just translating software but making it look and feel like it was originally written for the target market. Apart from the translation, the following issues must be taken into account.

• Date formats; for example, for December 8^th 1994 in United States we write 12/08/94, in Spain 08/12/94, in Germany 08.12.1994, in Japan 94/12/08. We should watch this very carefully, as these issues may lead to user confusion.
• Time formats; in USA the AM/PM format is used but in most of European and Asian countries the 24-hour format is preferred.
• Number formats; for example, in USA the thousand separator is a comma (2,244), in Germany it’s a period (2.244) and in Russia a space (2 244)
• Address formats
• Currency, telephone numbers, paper sizes, units of measurement
• Cultural peculiarities; for example, some colors or signs/symbols may have different meaning in different Countries and cultures: white in Japan symbolizes death whereas in Western cultures it symbolizes purity.
• National symbols and flags, appropriate country information
• Idioms and proverbs of the local culture
• Web links and addresses; for example changing http://www.google.com to http://www.google.fr for France
• Product and brand names. Note that most software applications are developed in English and when translating products names in most cases trademarked names are left in as-is (e.g. Microsoft, Nikon, Nokia). but service names may need to be translated, for example Google Books is translated into German as Google Bücher, into Spanish as Google Libros etc.

Locale indicates the combination “language_country”, for example “en_us” is English language for US users, “en_gb” is English language for Great Britain. Other examples are Spanish for Argentina (“es_ar”), Urugay (“es_uy”) or Spain (“es_es”). When it comes to software development, language codes usually follow the ISO 639-1 standard, while Country codes follow the ISO 3166 standard. Language and Country codes are separated by a dash or by an underscore, depending on the development platform.

Software localization consists in the translation of all UI items and help information, if available.

Internationalization aims to make the product more general and support usage in multiple languages and different cultural environments, ready for localization. In most cases it is recommended to be done during the software development phase.

Internationalization includes such issues as:

• separation of translatable text from the code (externalization);
• enabling display of different character sets, typically Unicode, and support of local standards;
• enabling usage of different regional settings as date, time and calendar formats, number formats, units of measurements etc.

During software development it’s important to make sure not to hard-code translatable text as later you’ll have to make extra efforts during string externalization, and most importantly localization testing, to spot all untranslated text.

So to cut the long story short:

• In general globalization refers to the efforts companies or organizations undergo to make their product available in different markets all over the world.
• Localization = translation + cultural and local adaptation
• Internationalization = getting things more general, preparing for localization
• Globalization = i18n+ l10n.

You may come across term simship, which means simultaneous shipment of all language versions to the market so users won’t wait for their language. The advantage of such approach is that the buzz about your product release has the best effect in all your markets, but there might be challenges to face during simultaneous localization, like handling small last-minute updates.

Pseudo-localization is one of the localization testing methods to find internationalization issues and bugs. In the process of pseudo-localization all translatable text is substituted with fake text that simulates the most common internationalization issues, like accented characters input and output and strings expansion (during pseudo-localization strings are expanded by 30% and more).

A TM or translation memory is a bilingual database that stores translations that can be re-used while translating similar content or an updated version of the same content.

As a closing note, the localization of your software into major languages will not only help increase your sales and revenue, but customers will understand your product or services clearly and use them properly, thus there will be less need for costly customer support.

Marta Velychko is a English to Ukrainian/Russian Translation and Localization Professional. She specializes in information technology (IT), telecommunication and marketing. She shares her experience at her Translation and l10n for dummies blog. You can also follow her on Twitter at @Martav88.