Importance of Software Localization

Author: ateleco1 | Posted: 08.02.2012

With the growing impact of globalization, most of the companies are engaged in exploring new markets worldwide to reap all the benefits of globalization. As most of the businesses are approaching towards internalization of their products and services, software market is also not any exception. As more and more software companies are approaching towards globalization, they want their software to be adapted to the culture of the target country, so that they can capture large number of customers. It leads to increase in demand for software localization and application localization from the businesses located worldwide.

Generally, people associate localization with simple translation of business website or product specifications into local language. However, software localization is much more than the translation of the product's user interface. It requires series of tasks, procedures and efforts of many people to convert software product as per the needs of a particular culture. Many other functions such as project management, software engineering, testing and desktop publishing, follows translation in the process of software localization. Thus, typically, unlike simple translation, software localization requires knowledge of software applications, process of making them adaptable to cultural changes apart from having language skills and knowledge of the culture. Generally, software localization involves the following series of steps:

• Analysis of the software project and evaluating the tools required for application localization

• Assessment of project in terms of cultural, technical and linguistic terms

• Creation of terminology glossaries

• Translation of content into the target language

• Designing the adaptable user interface, including resizing of forms and dialogs, as required

• Localization of all media such as graphics, scripts etc.

• Compilation of the localized files for testing

• Quality Assurance for linguistic and functional aspects of the project

• Project delivery

Thus, software localization mainly deals with translating your business software into the language adaptable to the linguistic conventions and cultural specifics of the targeted region. It actually helps to make your organization adaptable to the culture of targeted audience so you can reap better relationships and higher revenues for your business.

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