When you start developing a software product, you may think to translate it into other languages. Given that less than 50% of Internet users speak English and non-English speakers are also very picky, localizing the software or website seems necessary. Nowadays, these users expect to be able to easily access local language versions of the websites and applications they visit.

Localization

Software localization, often abbreviated to L10n, is the process of adapting a software to a particular culture and something beyond translating a product’s user interface. The software localization aims to overcome cultural barriers in order to achieve a larger target market. Software localization is the process of adapting a product linguistically, culturally and technically to the target market. This process is very laborious and time consuming for the software development team.

A well-localized software product looks like a product that was originally written and designed for the target market considering units of measurement, format of numbers, address format, time formats, fonts, default font selection, copyright issues, data generation, payment methods, currency conversion, taxes and so on.

Facebook as a localization project

Consider, for example, Facebook, which was originally developed as an app by Harvard students and is now one of the largest Internet social networking platforms localized in more than 100 languages.

Translation vs. localization

Traditional translation is usually an activity performed after the source text has been prepared.  It is one of the activities in the localization project – others include project management, software engineering, testing and desktop publishing.

In other words, localization considers culturally sensitive aspects that go beyond translation. For example, emoji 👌, which is a symbol of “Okay” in the West, in some Arabic countries is considered an insult.