computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...

, internationalization and localization ( American) or internationalisation and localisation (

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. * British national identity, the characteristics of British people and culture ...

), often abbreviated i18n and l10n respectively, are means of adapting to different languages, regional peculiarities and technical requirements of a target locale. Internationalization is the process of designing a software application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes. Localization is the process of adapting internationalized software for a specific region or language by translating text and adding locale-specific components. Localization (which is potentially performed multiple times, for different locales) uses the infrastructure or flexibility provided by internationalization (which is ideally performed only once before localization, or as an integral part of ongoing development).

Naming

The terms are frequently abbreviated to the

numeronym A numeronym is a word, usually an abbreviation, composed partially or wholly of numerals. The term can be used to describe several different number-based constructs, but it most commonly refers to a contraction in which all letters between the fir ...

s ''i18n'' (where ''18'' stands for the number of letters between the first ''i'' and the last ''n'' in the word ''internationalization'', a usage coined at

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

in the 1970s or 1980s) and ''l10n'' for ''localization'', due to the length of the words. Some writers have the latter term capitalized (''L10n'') to help distinguish the two. Some companies, like

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

and

Oracle An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Descript ...

, use the term ''globalization'', ''g11n'', for the combination of internationalization and localization.

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

defines internationalization as a combination of world-readiness and localization. World-readiness is a developer task, which enables a product to be used with multiple scripts and cultures (globalization) and separates user interface resources in a localizable format (localizability, abbreviated to ''L12y'').

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

and

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is a proprietary software, proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise; current versions support HPE Integrity Servers, based on Intel's Itanium architect ...

created a system called "National Language Support" or "Native Language Support" (NLS) to produce localizable software. Some vendors, including IBM use the term ''National Language Version'' (NLV) for localized versions of software products supporting only one specific locale. The term implies the existence of other alike NLV versions of the software for different markets; this terminology is not used where no internationalization and localization was undertaken and a software product only supports one language and locale in any version.

Scope

According to ''Software without frontiers'', the design aspects to consider when internationalizing a product are "data encoding, data and documentation, software construction, hardware device support, and user interaction"; while the key design areas to consider when making a fully internationalized product from scratch are "user interaction, algorithm design and data formats, software services, and documentation". Translation is typically the most time-consuming component of

language localization Language localisation (or language localization) is the process of adapting a product's translation to a specific country or region. It is the second phase of a larger process of product translation and cultural adaptation (for specific countries ...

. This may involve: * For film, video, and audio, translation of spoken words or music lyrics, often using either

dubbing Dubbing (also known as re-recording and mixing) is a post-production process used in filmmaking and the video production process where supplementary recordings (known as doubles) are lip-synced and "mixed" with original production audio to cr ...

subtitles Subtitles are texts representing the contents of the audio in a film, television show, opera or other audiovisual media. Subtitles might provide a transcription or translation of spoken dialogue. Although naming conventions can vary, caption ...

* Text translation for printed materials, and digital media (possibly including error messages and documentation) * Potentially altering images and logos containing text to contain translations or generic icons * Different translation lengths and differences in character sizes (e.g. between

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

letters and

Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...

) can cause layouts that work well in one language to work poorly in others * Consideration of differences in

dialect A dialect is a Variety (linguistics), variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standard language, standardized varieties as well as Vernacular language, vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardize ...

register Register or registration may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc. * ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller * Registration (organ), ...

or variety * Writing conventions like: ** Formatting of numbers (especially

decimal separator FIle:Decimal separators.svg, alt=Four types of separating decimals: a) 1,234.56. b) 1.234,56. c) 1'234,56. d) ١٬٢٣٤٫٥٦., Both a comma and a full stop (or period) are generally accepted decimal separators for international use. The apost ...

and

digit grouping FIle:Decimal separators.svg, alt=Four types of separating decimals: a) 1,234.56. b) 1.234,56. c) 1'234,56. d) ١٬٢٣٤٫٥٦., Both a comma and a full stop (or period) are generally accepted decimal separators for international use. The apost ...

) **

Date and time format Different conventions exist around the world for date and time representation, both written and spoken. Differences Differences can exist in: *The calendar that is used for List of date formats by country, Date format. *The order in which th ...

, possibly including the use of different calendars (e.g. the

Islamic Islam is an Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the Quran, and the teachings of Muhammad. Adherents of Islam are called Muslims, who are estimated to number Islam by country, 2 billion worldwide and are the world ...

or the

Japanese calendar Japanese calendar types have included a range of official and unofficial systems. At present, Japan uses the Gregorian calendar together with year designations stating the Japanese era name, year of the reign of the current Emperor. The written f ...

)

Standard locale data

Computer software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

can encounter differences above and beyond straightforward translation of words and phrases, because computer programs can generate content dynamically. These differences may need to be taken into account by the internationalization process in preparation for translation. Many of these differences are so regular that a conversion between languages can be easily automated. The

Common Locale Data Repository The Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) is a project of the Unicode Consortium to provide locale data in XML format for use in computer applications. CLDR contains locale-specific information that an operating system will typically provide to ...

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

provides a collection of such differences. Its data is used by major

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s, including

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

and

Debian Debian () is a free and open-source software, free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock in August 1993. Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kerne ...

, and by major Internet companies or projects such as

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

and the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...

. Examples of such differences include: * Different "scripts" in different

writing systems A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independe ...

use different characters – a different set of letters, syllograms, logograms, or symbols. Modern systems use the

standard to represent many different languages with a single

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...

. *

Writing direction A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...

is left to right in most European languages, right-to-left in Hebrew and Arabic, or both in

boustrophedon Boustrophedon () is a style of writing in which alternate lines of writing are reversed, with letters also written in reverse, mirror-style. This is in contrast to modern European languages, where lines always begin on the same side, usually the l ...

scripts, and optionally vertical in some Asian languages. * Complex text layout, for languages where characters change shape depending on context * Capitalization exists in some scripts and not in others * Different languages and writing systems have different text sorting rules * Different languages have different

numeral systems A numeral system is a writing system for expressing numbers; that is, a mathematical notation for representing numbers of a given set, using digits or other symbols in a consistent manner. The same sequence of symbols may represent different ...

, which might need to be supported if

Western Arabic numerals The ten Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9) are the most commonly used symbols for writing numbers. The term often also implies a positional notation number with a decimal base, in particular when contrasted with Roman numerals. ...

are not used * Different languages have different pluralization rules, which can complicate programs that dynamically display numerical content. Other grammar rules might also vary, e.g.

genitive In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can ...

. * Different languages use different punctuation (e.g. quoting text using double-quotes (" ") as in English, or guillemets (« ») as in French) *

Keyboard shortcut In computing, a keyboard shortcut (also hotkey/hot key or key binding) is a software-based assignment of an action to one or more keys on a computer keyboard. Most Operating system, operating systems and Application software, applications come ...

s can only make use of buttons on the

keyboard layout A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual, or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. Standard keybo ...

which is being localized for. If a shortcut corresponds to a word in a particular language (e.g. Ctrl-s stands for "save" in English), it may need to be changed.

National conventions

Different countries have different economic conventions, including variations in: *

Paper size Paper size refers to Technical standard, standardized dimensions for sheets of paper used globally in stationery, printing, and technical drawing. Most countries adhere to the ISO 216 standard, which includes the widely recognized A series ( ...

s *

Broadcast television systems Broadcast television systems (or terrestrial television systems outside the US and Canada) are the encoding or formatting systems for the transmission and reception of terrestrial television signals. Analog television systems were standardized ...

and popular

storage media Data storage is the recording (storing) of information (data) in a storage medium. Handwriting, phonographic recording, magnetic tape, and optical discs are all examples of storage media. Biological molecules such as RNA and DNA are cons ...

* Telephone number formats * Postal address formats,

postal code A postal code (also known locally in various English-speaking countries throughout the world as a postcode, post code, PIN or ZIP Code) is a series of letters or numerical digit, digits or both, sometimes including spaces or punctuation, inclu ...

s, and choice of delivery services *

Currency A currency is a standardization of money in any form, in use or circulation as a medium of exchange, for example banknotes and coins. A more general definition is that a currency is a ''system of money'' in common use within a specific envi ...

(

symbols A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise different concep ...

, positions of currency markers, and reasonable amounts due to different

inflation In economics, inflation is an increase in the average price of goods and services in terms of money. This increase is measured using a price index, typically a consumer price index (CPI). When the general price level rises, each unit of curre ...

histories) –

ISO 4217 ISO 4217 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that defines alpha codes and numeric codes for the representation of currencies and provides information about the relationships between individ ...

codes are often used for internationalization *

System of measurement A system of units of measurement, also known as a system of units or system of measurement, is a collection of units of measurement and rules relating them to each other. Systems of measurement have historically been important, regulated and defi ...

* Battery sizes * Voltage and current standards In particular, the United States and Europe differ in most of these cases. Other areas often follow one of these. Specific third-party services, such as online maps, weather reports, or

payment service provider A payment service provider (PSP) is a third-party company that allows businesses to accept electronic payments, such as credit card and debit card payments. PSPs act as intermediaries between those who make payments, i.e. consumers, and those who ...

s, might not be available worldwide from the same carriers, or at all.

Time zone A time zone is an area which observes a uniform standard time for legal, Commerce, commercial and social purposes. Time zones tend to follow the boundaries between Country, countries and their Administrative division, subdivisions instead of ...

s vary across the world, and this must be taken into account if a product originally only interacted with people in a single time zone. For internationalization, UTC is often used internally and then converted into a local time zone for display purposes. Different countries have different legal requirements, meaning for example: *

Regulatory compliance In general, compliance means conforming to a rule, such as a specification, policy, standard or law. Compliance has traditionally been explained by reference to deterrence theory, according to which punishing a behavior will decrease the viol ...

may require customization for a particular jurisdiction, or a change to the product as a whole, such as: **

Privacy law Privacy law is a set of regulations that govern the collection, storage, and utilization of personal information from healthcare, governments, companies, public or private entities, or individuals. Privacy laws are examined in relation to an ind ...

compliance ** Additional

disclaimer A disclaimer is generally any statement intended to specify or delimit the scope of rights and obligations that may be exercised and enforced by parties in a legally recognized relationship. In contrast to other terms for legally operative langua ...

s on a website or packaging ** Different consumer labelling requirements ** Compliance with export restrictions and regulations on

encryption In Cryptography law, cryptography, encryption (more specifically, Code, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the inf ...

** Compliance with an

Internet censorship Internet censorship is the legal control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. Censorship is most often applied to specific internet domains (such as ''Wikipedia.org'', for example) but exceptionally may ...

regime or

subpoena A subpoena (; also subpœna, supenna or subpena) or witness summons is a writ issued by a government agency, most often a court, to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence under a penalty for failure. There are two common types of ...

procedures ** Requirements for accessibility ** Collecting different taxes, such as

sales tax A sales tax is a tax paid to a governing body for the sales of certain goods and services. Usually laws allow the seller to collect funds for the tax from the consumer at the point of purchase. When a tax on goods or services is paid to a govern ...

value added tax A value-added tax (VAT or goods and services tax (GST), general consumption tax (GCT)) is a consumption tax that is levied on the value added at each stage of a product's production and distribution. VAT is similar to, and is often compared wi ...

, or

customs duties A tariff or import tax is a duty (tax), duty imposed by a national Government, government, customs territory, or supranational union on imports of goods and is paid by the importer. Exceptionally, an export tax may be levied on exports of goods ...

** Sensitivity to different political issues, like geographical naming disputes and disputed borders shown on maps (e.g., India has proposed a bill that would make failing to show

Kashmir Kashmir ( or ) is the Northwestern Indian subcontinent, northernmost geographical region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term ''Kashmir'' denoted only the Kashmir Valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir P ...

and other areas as intended by the government a crime) * Government-assigned numbers have different formats (such as passports,

Social Security Number In the United States, a Social Security number (SSN) is a nine-digit number issued to United States nationality law, U.S. citizens, Permanent residence (United States), permanent residents, and temporary (working) residents under section 205(c)(2 ...

s and other

national identification number A national identification number or national identity number is used by the governments of many countries as a means of uniquely identifying their citizens or residents for the purposes of work, taxation, government benefits, health care, bank ...

s) Localization also may take into account differences in culture, such as: * Local holidays *

Personal name A personal name, full name or prosoponym (from Ancient Greek ''prósōpon'' – person, and ''onoma'' –name) is the set of names by which an individual person or animal is known. When taken together as a word-group, they all relate to that on ...

and

title A title is one or more words used before or after a person's name, in certain contexts. It may signify their generation, official position, military rank, professional or academic qualification, or nobility. In some languages, titles may be ins ...

conventions *

Aesthetics Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and taste (sociology), taste, which in a broad sense incorporates the philosophy of art.Slater, B. H.Aesthetics ''Internet Encyclopedia of Ph ...

* Comprehensibility and cultural appropriateness of images and

color symbolism Color symbolism in art, literature, and anthropology is the use of color as a symbol in various cultures and in storytelling. There is great diversity in the use of colors and their associations between cultures and even within the same culture i ...

Ethnicity An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people with shared attributes, which they Collective consciousness, collectively believe to have, and long-term endogamy. Ethnicities share attributes like language, culture, common sets of ancestry, ...

, clothing, and

socioeconomic status Socioeconomic status (SES) is a measurement used by economics, economists and sociology, sociologsts. The measurement combines a person's work experience and their or their family's access to economic resources and social position in relation t ...

of people and architecture of locations pictured * Local customs and conventions, such as social taboos, popular local religions, or superstitions such as blood types in Japanese culture vs. astrological signs in other cultures

Business process for internationalizing software

To ''internationalize'' a product, it is important to look at a variety of markets that the product will foreseeably enter. Details such as field length for street addresses, unique format for the address, ability to make the postal code field optional to address countries that do not have postal codes or the state field for countries that do not have states, plus the introduction of new registration flows that adhere to local laws are just some of the examples that make internationalization a complex project. A broader approach takes into account cultural factors regarding for example the adaptation of the business process logic or the inclusion of individual cultural (behavioral) aspects. Already in the 1990s, companies such as

Bull A bull is an intact (i.e., not Castration, castrated) adult male of the species ''Bos taurus'' (cattle). More muscular and aggressive than the females of the same species (i.e. cows proper), bulls have long been an important symbol cattle in r ...

used

machine translation Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages. Early approaches were mostly rule-based or statisti ...

( Systran) on a large scale, for all their translation activity: human translators handled pre-editing (making the input machine-readable) and post-editing.

Engineering

Both in re-engineering an existing software or designing a new internationalized software, the first step of internationalization is to split each potentially locale-dependent part (whether code, text or data) into a separate module. Each module can then either rely on a standard library/dependency or be independently replaced as needed for each locale. The current prevailing practice is for applications to place text in resource files which are loaded during program execution as needed. These strings, stored in resource files, are relatively easy to translate. Programs are often built to reference resource libraries depending on the selected locale data. The storage for translatable and translated strings is sometimes called a message catalog as the strings are called messages. The catalog generally comprises a set of files in a specific localization format and a standard library to handle said format. One

software library In computing, a library is a collection of resources that can be leveraged during software development to implement a computer program. Commonly, a library consists of executable code such as compiled functions and classes, or a library can ...

and format that aids this is gettext. Thus to get an application to support multiple languages one would design the application to select the relevant language resource file at runtime. The code required to manage data entry verification and many other locale-sensitive data types also must support differing locale requirements. Modern development systems and operating systems include sophisticated libraries for international support of these types, see also Standard locale data above. Many localization issues (e.g. writing direction, text sorting) require more profound changes in the software than text translation. For example,

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed) and Collabora Online, with Apache OpenOffice being considered mostly d ...

achieves this with compilation switches.

Process

A globalization method includes, after planning, three implementation steps: internationalization, localization and quality assurance. To some degree (e.g. for

quality assurance Quality assurance (QA) is the term used in both manufacturing and service industries to describe the systematic efforts taken to assure that the product(s) delivered to customer(s) meet with the contractual and other agreed upon performance, design ...

), development teams include someone who handles the basic/central stages of the process which then enables all the others. Such persons typically understand foreign languages and cultures and have some technical background. Specialized technical writers are required to construct a culturally appropriate syntax for potentially complicated concepts, coupled with engineering resources to deploy and test the localization elements. Once properly internationalized, software can rely on more decentralized models for localization:

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

usually rely on self-localization by end-users and volunteers, sometimes organized in teams. The

GNOME project GNOME Project is a community behind the GNOME desktop environment and the software platform upon which it is based. It consists of all the software developers, artists, writers, translators, other contributors, and active users of GNOME. The GNOM ...

, for example, has volunteer translation teams for over 100 languages.

MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...

supports over 500 languages, of which 100 are mostly complete . When translating existing text to other languages, it is difficult to maintain the parallel versions of texts throughout the life of the product. For instance, if a message displayed to the user is modified, all of the translated versions must be changed.

Independent software vendor An independent software vendor (ISV), also known as a software publisher, is an organization specializing in making and selling software, in contrast to computer hardware, designed for mass or niche markets. This is in contrast to in-house softwa ...

such as

may provides reference software localization guidelines for developers. The software localization language may be different from

written language A written language is the representation of a language by means of writing. This involves the use of visual symbols, known as graphemes, to represent linguistic units such as phonemes, syllables, morphemes, or words. However, written language is ...

Commercial considerations

In a commercial setting, the benefit of localization is access to more markets. In the early 1980s,

Lotus 1-2-3 Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles ...

took two years to separate program code and text and lost the market lead in Europe over Microsoft Multiplan. MicroPro found that using an Austrian translator for the West German market caused its

WordStar WordStar is a discontinued word processor application for microcomputers. It was published by MicroPro International and originally written for the CP/M-80 operating system (OS), with later editions added for MS-DOS and other 16-bit computing, ...

documentation to, an executive said, not "have the tone it should have had". When

Tandy Corporation Tandy Corporation was an American family-owned Retail, retailer based in Fort Worth, Texas that made leather goods, operated the RadioShack chain, and later built personal computers. Tandy Leather was founded in 1919 as a leather supply store ...

needed French and German translations of English error messages for the

TRS-80 Model 4 The TRS-80 Model 4 is the last Z80-based home computer family by Radio Shack, sold from April 1983 through late 1991. Model 4 Tandy Corporation introduced the TRS-80 Model 4 on April 26, 1983 as the successor to the TRS-80 Model III. The ...

, the company's Belgium office and five translators in the US produced six different versions that varied on the

gender Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...

of computer components. However, there are considerable costs involved, which go far beyond engineering. Further, business operations must adapt to manage the production, storage and distribution of multiple discrete localized products, which are often being sold in completely different currencies, regulatory environments and tax regimes. Finally, sales, marketing and

technical support Technical support, commonly shortened as tech support, is a customer service provided to customers to resolve issues, commonly with consumer electronics. This is commonly provided via call centers, online chat and email. Many companies provid ...

must also facilitate their operations in the new languages, to support customers for the localized products. Particularly for relatively small language populations, it may never be economically viable to offer a localized product. Even where large language populations could justify localization for a given product, and a product's internal structure already permits localization, a given software developer or publisher may lack the size and sophistication to manage the ancillary functions associated with operating in multiple locales.

References

External links

*
Localization vs. Internationalization by The World Wide Web Consortium
*{{Commons category-inline Business terms Globalization Information and communication technologies for development International trade Natural language and computing Technical communication Translation Transliteration Word coinage