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Savytska L. V.
Associate Professor,
PhD in Philology
Simon Kuznets Kharkiv
National University of Economics
Localization has
become a popular concept in both translation practice and theory. Four main
historical phases are generally designated: software, websites [6], mobile
phones and video games [7] including those that are digitally distributed. As
desktop personal computers became more prevalent throughout the 1980s and software
companies began to envision sales in countries and languages for which software
programs were not originally conceived, the need arose to modify the functions
and features of the applications in such a way that they would fulfill the requirements
and demands of local consumers. At the same time that software engineers and
programmers were coding content in their respective local languages around the
world, the effective marketing and localization strategies and campaigns by
multinational developers and the initial forays into initiatives that sought to
harmonize protocols internationally – Unicode character encoding is one example
would eventually give way to increasing use of standard interfaces and
terminology for office applications and Internet browsers worldwide. Indeed,
the quest for a more seamless communication process by computer across diverse
protocols, interfaces, and platforms in multiple languages was not confined to
business transactions; it became a social experience as well.
Localization service
providers quickly developed into large organizations. The growing ease with
which to offer multilingual services allowed for the emergence of multiple
language vendors in addition to the usual single language vendors. The array of
services associated with producing multilingual translations expanded to
include project management, software engineering, graphics engineering, desktop
publishing, and eventually sophisticated content management system development
and maintenance. The more complex the process for creating and distributing
digital content at its origin with the client, the more complex the subsequent
process became of extracting the content from its original digital framework
for translation and localization. In a highly competitive market, software and
hardware products with short shelf lives must be regularly and quickly updated
and launched at the same time (known as simultaneous shipment, or simship) in myriad languages. Software programs designed to deal
specifically with the new and diverse translation and localization environments
have consistently improved, leading to the now common use of translation memory
and terminology management systems, part of the suite of functionalities known
as computer-assisted translation tools. Machine translation and postdating
services now supplement these traditional ones [4].
Today the localization
industry is supported by professional organizations such as the Localization
Research Centre, the Centre for Next Generation Localization, the annual
Localization World conference, and the Globalization and Localization
Association.
Localization refers
not only to the professional procedure of adapting content linguistically,
culturally, and technically; it also is used more loosely to refer to the
entire industry that has emerged around localization. It is also highly context
bound [4]. The acronym GILT (globalization
internationalization localization
translation) refers to the four correlated and interdependent activities
that now comprise this industry.
Although the order of the activities referred to in the acronym indicate the
current sequence of processes that should ideally take place, the emergence of
the terms historically is exactly the reverse. Overlapping practices,
histories, and theorizations of the practices yield different readings in the
translation studies domain.
Globalization, in
general, has a long history of debate in various contexts (economic, political
and social) and acquires more specific meaning in the practice of professional
localization. Penned G11N for short, globalization is synonymous with a certain
mind-set that includes a series of corporate tasks.
This lends support to
Fry (2003), who noted early on that globalization is “the process of making all
the necessary technical, financial, managerial, personnel, marketing and other
enterprise decisions to facilitate localization” [5, p. 42].
Internationalization,
abbreviated in the professional domain, refers generally to two approaches, the
first technical and the second linguistic/cultural. In terms of historical
chronology, the widespread introduction of internationalization procedures grew
out of a convergence between the knowledge gained from real localization
project experience, evolving technologies, and the development of various
protocols. It advocates separating the code from content and supporting
international natural language character sets when the original digital content
is first conceptualized so that there is less need for manipulation and
engineering of the code later, when it is localized. Internationalization also
includes use of controlled language.
Localization in terms
of professional procedure rather than in reference to the industry overall, is
most closely linked to translation. In its broadest sense, localization
“revolves around combining language and technology to produce a product that
can cross cultural and language barriers – no more, no less” [2, p. 5] and
implies “the full provision of services and technologies for the management of
multilingualism across the digital information flow” [1, p. 4]. Depending on
the technical complexity of the content originating at the source, and on the
languages and cultural regional users for which it is ultimately destined,
localization project resources and workflows will vary substantially. In a
nutshell, however, three areas are always addressed: linguistic, cultural, and
technical. Content that was adapted linguistically and culturally before
widespread use of computers, information, and communication technologies and
digital devices was most commonly addressed in the literature as “adaptation.”
Technical adaptation through technologies for use of the content in or with
other technologies prompted the shift in terminology (i.e., to “localization”)
in the translation domain.
Translation, the last
component of the GILT acronym, can be viewed from two main perspectives in
relation to localization. When analyzed from the perspective of professional
workflow models, translation is a part of localization. When conceptualized
from the perspective of translation history and the academic discipline,
localization is a part of translation. There are various ways of analyzing,
interpreting, and understanding translation in this context. If we assume that
localization is about adapting a text so that it accounts for the local (i.e.,
target culture’s) linguistic and cultural norms and conventions, then the idea
seems to be well established in both translation studies and practice. Adding a
new term (i.e., localization) would therefore seem unnecessary, except that we
are clearly moving away from the traditional sense of translation within the
equivalence paradigm.
As a last remark in
this discussion of the characteristics of digital and media backdrops in
relation to translation, according to some scholars, globalization (in the
general sense) is believed to promote (cultural) homogeneity and impose
sameness, whereas others tend to think of it more in terms of cultural heterogeneity.
The two opposing approaches to globalization have been partially reconciled, at
least to some extent, within the concept of glocalization
introduced by Robertson [8], a concept that has been a useful for considering
traditional localization practices operating from top to bottom. On the one hand,
we witness some homogenizing processes in the form of product globalization and internationalization that would seem to impose sameness; on the
other hand, there are localizing processes in the form of product localization, whereby the products are
adapted both linguistically (translation)
and culturally so that they have the look and feel of a locally made product.
However, no matter how local a given product looks, it will still retain a
number of features of the original, global product (e.g., Microsoft’s Windows
has some distinctive features across all its localized versions that make it
easily recognizable irrespective of the language into which it has been
localized). It could therefore be argued that such products are, in fact, glocalized.
References
1. Dunne K.
Perspectives on Localization. – Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006. – 356 p.
2. Esselink B. The
evolution of localization // Localization: The guide from Multilingual Computing
and Technology. – 2003. – Vol. 57 (July–August). – P. 4-7.
3. Folaron D. A.
discipline coming of age in the digital age / Perspectives on localization. –
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006. – ATA Scholarly Monograph Series. – Vol. 23. –
P. 195–219.
4. Folaron D.
Digitalizing translation. Translation Spaces. – Amsterdam: John Benjamins,
2012. – Vol.1. – P. 3–31.
5. Fry D. The localization Industry Primer. – [Electronic resource]. –
Access mode: www.dynamiclanguage.com/home14/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/LISA-Glo
balizaion-Primer.pdf
6. Jiménez
Crespo M. Translation and Web localization. – New York - London: Routledge,
2013. – 244 p.
7. O’Hagan M. &
Mangiron C. Game localization. – Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins,
2013.
8. Robertson R. Globalisation
or glocalisation? – Journal of International Communication. – 1994. – Vol.
1(1). P. 33–52.