127 ft. deep with Globalization

Despite the spread of English through economic globalization, not all users of software speak English. Even though English is largely a second language throughout the world, neither all speakers are able to use the language efficiently in their work, nor everyone prefer having to use English to accomplish their daily tasks; this is particularly true at the end user level. In other words, national language identity is very much alive all across, for very practical reasons.

As Wikipedia says, Globalization is the process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale. It means making applications work seamlessly, regardless of the user's language and culture.

Globalization starts with the design of the application to allow its use in non-English locales; this is called Internationalization. Features such as date and currency format choices, dynamic resizing of user interface elements, ability to input, view, and display data using different character sets such as ideographic (Double-Byte Character Set) and simple text (Single-Byte Character Set) are all part of concept of Internationalization. Complex bi-directional text languages such as Arabic and Hebrew must also be seamlessly supported. Ability to cater to regional law-enforced requirements must be factored in, else the product cannot be sold in target country. Internationalization therefore is the process of producing an application’s design and code which is free of any dependency on the language and culture specific attributes in which this is being seen.

However, an internationalized application is not usable in any region of the world unless it is localized for that specific region. It must speak the local language in every sense of the word. With a solid foundation of internationalization in place, it is relatively easy to then localize it into the desired language. Localization is the process of adapting an internationalized application to a specific language, script, cultural, and coded character set environment. In localization, the same semantics are preserved while the syntax may be changed. Localization goes beyond text translation and also required to cater to local conventions as well. For instance, one can select Arabic as a language, but also Egypt as the specific locale of Arabic. Locale allows for locale-specific variations on the usage of format, currency, spellchecker, punctuation, etc., all within the same language area.

Putting Internalization and Localization together we get what we call Globalization. As the convention goes, by counting the number of letters between first and last letter of each of these words (Globalization = Internalization + Localization) this is referred as G11N = I18N + L10N. However for all practical purposes, G11N has more to it, other than I18N and L10N.

Fig 1: Globalization Components

On a very high level, globalization looks just this, however as you go deep and start implementing things, there are hundreds of small and big decisions and activities that are required to be taken care of. In this context here is a list of 127 key considerations which can come handy for any globalization project. These considerations are all organized under following next level groups.

Fig 2: Globalization Overview