Being a part of globalisation today, have you ever wondered what internationalisation and localisation mean, and what is the relation between them?

Localisation

Localisation refers to the manner in which a product, application or document content is tailored to meet the language, cultural and other requirements of a particular target market or a setting.

At times, localisation is written as ‘l10n’, where 10 is the number of letters between ‘l’ and ‘n’.

And you thought that localisation is just a synonym for translation of the user interface and documentation? Think again for localisation is lot more complex. It can involve specifics related to the following:

Numeric, date and time formats

Use of currency

Keyboard usage

Collation and sorting

Symbols, icons and colors

Text and graphics with references to objects, actions or ideas which, in a given culture, may be subject to misinterpretation or viewed as insensitive

Varying legal requirements and many more things

In fact, localisation can even demand a complete rethinking of logic, visual design, or presentation. This is likely if the way of doing business (like accounting) or the accepted model for learning (as in focus on individual against group) in a given backdrop differs drastically from the original culture.

Internationalisation

Internationalisation or globalisation, on the other hand, is development of a product or document content in a way that it is easily adaptable or acceptable by people who may differ in culture, region, or language.

Internationalisation is often written ‘i18n’, where 18 is the number of letters between ‘i’ and ‘n’ in the English word.

Internationalisation usually involves:

Designing and developing a product in a manner that eliminates hurdles to localisation or global use. This could include the use of Unicode, or proper handling of legacy character encodings where apt, taking care over the concatenation of strings, avoiding reliance on code of user-interface string values, etc.

Providing support for features that one may not be able to use before localisation. For example, adding markup in your DTD to support bidirectional text, or for identifying language. Or adding to CSS support for vertical text or other non-Latin typographic features.

Facilitating code to support local, regional, language, or culturally-related choices. This usually implies integrating predefined localisation data and features from existing libraries or user likings. Examples include date and time formats, local calendars, number formats and numeral systems, sorting and presentation of lists, handling of personal names and forms of address, etc.

Separating localisable elements from source code or content, so that local alternatives can be used or selected based on the user’s global preferences as needed.

Have you observed something? These items do not always include localisation of the content into another language. They are design and development practices that allow such a passage to take place easily in the future. What if no localisation ever takes place? Even then the design may have noteworthy utility.

The value of internationalisation -

Internationalisation substantially affects the ease with which a product can be localised. Retrofitting a linguistically- and culturally-centered product for a universal market is bound to be much more difficult and entail more time than designing it globally.

Exercise your brains and try to remember the Y2K effort to ‘undo’ two-character year fields that were built on the assumption of ‘19xx’.

Thus, internationalisation is a crucial step in the design and development process. It is not any postscript involving clumsy and costly re-engineering.