Many companies with complex software start out knowing they need help meeting product globalization objectives, but they are still new to what help they will need and where technology and language distinctions lay. That’s confounded by grey areas that sit in between internationalization and localization. What’s at stake is meeting delivery time tables, supporting financial objectives and making a quality product that works well everywhere. I thought it would be appropriate to write a bit about the experiences I see working with many companies looking for internationalization help. Full disclosure: I run an internationalization company which provides a wide range of services and product to make the job go faster.

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Localization, Internationalization, Globalization? Choosing Wisely
Internationalization Articles March 21st, 2008
by Adam Asnes for M ultiLingual Computing
M any companies with complex software start out knowing they need help meeting product globalization objectives,
but they are still new to what help they will need and where technology and language distinctions lay. That’s
confounded by grey areas that sit in between internationalization and localization. What’s at stake is meeting
delivery time tables, supporting financial objectives and making a quality product that works well everywhere. I
thought it would be appropriate to write a bit about the experiences I see working with many companies looking for
internationalization help. Full disclosure: I run an internationalization company which provides a wide range of
services and product to make the job go faster.
Like most technology verticals, we have some hard to swallow terms in this industry. M any readers of this magazine
are familiar with distinctions between localization (l10n) and internationalization (i18n), and the catch all for
everything – Globalization (g11n), but I’ll tell you that most of the software development world at large tends to
blend it all together in a mishmash of terms that are rarely consistent. Check Wikipedia if you’re reading this and
need help understanding the distinctions, but for all intents and purposes they are very blurry to clientele when
they first go trolling the internet for help. But very quickly, clients learn that they need to get more discriminating.
When clients go looking for engineering assistance, they often learn late that the basic skills behind localization and
those behind internationalization are completely different. They have the same ultimate globalization aims, but
localization expertise involves all the issues around working well with language and project management of linguistic
resources with only linguistic-deliverable development oriented engineering skills needed. Engineering tasks for
localization efforts typically involve managing translation memories, managing resource files, possibly interface
geometry resizing, a little build management understanding plus linguistic QA.
Internationalization skills are entirely software development focused. Really the translation is incidental to the target
character encoding and locale management in the guts of the software. Internationalization engineers need to be
very talented developers who are capable of working with multiple programming languages (as opposed to written
languages) and databases, rapidly going from design to development to deployment while dovetailing with your in-
house development teams – who aren’t going to sit on their hands and stop creating new features while
internationalization efforts are going on.
So the first lesson here is that you need to separate your thinking around localization and internationalization
in terms of their widely different skill demands.
We actually did a survey (we published results as a whitepaper) of our clients and people that have signed up for our
newsletters and communications from our website. The numbers clearly showed that most people, even within our
globalization-educated sample, have trouble understanding their own needs, and have often underestimated efforts,
scope and distinctions between localization and internationalization.
Different Development Stages – Different Internationalization Needs
Differentiating your immediate situation will help you optimize your choices with vendors and appropriate solutions.
Here are some examples:
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Your software hasn’t been created yet: If your software is first being developed and you’ve established that
your globalization requirements are important. You have a great opportunity to minimize expensive surprises
from the outset. The types of services you might be interested include:
requirements development
architectural planning and documentation and
training
Consulting might include a product to monitor internationalization development progress, perhaps reporting issues
during your regular build process.
Your software is developed and you want to get it internationalized using your own internal engineers.
Usually internationalization efforts need to be performed on an as fast as possible basis. Given that your team
may be inexperienced with internationalization issues, consulting can help you effectively leverage your team
quickly. You need an educated assessment of what’s involved and what resources will be needed, solid cost
estimates and architectural assistance. Internationalization efforts must dovetail with new feature
development and ongoing maintenance needs as there often are sets of choices that will need optimizing.
Consider:
requirements development
architectural planning and documentation
training
productivity software
ongoing Development Assistance
project management
Your Software is developed, but you need to outsource internationalization. M aybe your development team
has to concentrate on building new features and achieving development goals for your current customer
base, and you can’t divert them into focused internationalization efforts. Or perhaps you have a globalization
promise that you know you just can’t meet with your development staff. It really makes sense to outsource
as that helps fill the expertise gap and you can meet more of your development and marketing goals in less
time and arguably less cost. Here’s what you need and what you should insist on:
All of the services listed previously plus…
You’ve got to be in LOVE with this team
I mean really, this team is going to get deep into changing stuff in your code that you’re going
to live with a long time
You need to see really good communication going on
The developers need to understand, your team, your product, your objectives clearly
Planning processes should be used to help you build confidence in the team
A clear and detailed development plan that all parties understand and agree to
A strong code management strategy
Does it make sense to branch the source? Who’s merging where and when?
The right answer depends on working out the solution
A joint test plan
No outside vendor who’s just been thrown a million lines of your legacy code is going to
be able to quickly adapt to knowing and testing your software with as much experience
as you have. You’ve got to work together to bridge knowledge gaps.
Good documentation skills so you’ll know exactly what’s been done to the code
And of course the ability to provide you with ongoing help once the project is done
The next time someone asks you for code translation, localization development, Unicode translation, or globalization,
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consider that you need to ask a few questions before you leap into guessing what that means. Chances are good
even they don’t really know till you work it out together.
*Don’t get me started with the idiotic acronym that is GILT (Globalization, Internationalization, Localization &
Translation). I suppose someone wanted to make everyone happy with that one, and forgot that GILT sounds a little
too much like something we get from our mothers when we don’t call home.
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