WhatIsGlobalization

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Although computers were developed across the world (the first computer was made at Manchester(UK) University, html was invented at CERN) Recently with Microsoft's monopoly the focus of programming has been in America; most software is written for the American audience, which effectively either locks out non-Americans or forces them to work in a American environment. Conversely, many foreign software houses develop software only for their local market, which is equally unusable by people from other regions, especially America. Given the potential for additional revenue from just minor changes to the source, and given the demand for localized versions of software, it can be important to develop software with a more worldly view.

The process of making software ready for international markets is collectively known as globalization. However, that process is generally broken into two halves: internationalization and localization.

Internationalization is the process of preparing software for a global market. It involves such things as supporting non-Latin character sets (see CharacterSet); separating hard-coded resources like strings and graphics from the main binary into special resource bundles; and using internationally sensitive algorithms where necessary such as sorting or formatting currency (pounds sterling versus dollars, for instance).

Localization adapts an application to a particular locale. A locale is the set of rules from a particular culture that an application needs to pay attention to when interacting with the user. For instance, a locale would include the language of the user (e.g. English, French, Japanese), how to format the date (e.g. MM/DD/YY, DD/MM/YY, YY/MM/DD), what the currency symbol is (e.g. $, £, ¥), and much more. Most of localization, though, involves translating culturally sensitive data such as text and graphics.

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Terminology

Note that "globalization" has an entirely different connotation in a political and economical context. I have never heard the term used in a software context and thus I am quite sceptical as to its usefulness. -- AlexSchroeder

In the context of software, many other terms have been created independently, sometimes emphasizing slightly different goals. Here is from http://www.m17n.org:

: m17n is the abbreviation of multilingualization which is coined from multi-lingual.

: We believe that multilingualization and internationalization are different but equally important concepts, and aims at creating useful multi-lingual software through many kinds of cooperation.

The term multilingualization thus applies to software that can be used with different languages (such as an editor to write English and Japanese into the same document).

Handy References

Lunde, K. (1993) Understanding Japanese Information Processing, O?Reilly & Associates.

Schmitt, D. (2000) International Programming for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Press.

Sun Microsystems. (2000) Java (TM) 2 Platform, Standard Edition, v 1.3API Specification, http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api

Unicode Consortium (2000). The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0, Addison-Wesley.

In my past work with globalization, I dealt only with proper internationalization. Localization was left up to translation and cultural experts. Indeed, I know very little about the cultures I aimed to support. This is a common occurrence amongst international developers. -- SunirShah

Is there any interest in special wiki internationalization issues, ie. collection of links to translated help and standard pages? See ZWiki:ZwikiInternationalisation for more examples and please leave an answer also there. - FlorianKonnertz,12-20

It would certainly be on-topic. See MultilingualWiki for some ideas. -- AlexSchroeder

See TWiki:Codev/InternationalisationEnhancements for lots of links and thinking on I18N generally, and some on localisation. There are now quite a few links and a fair bit of material on Unicode, since that's the next step for TWiki. --RichardDonkin

WhatIsGlobalization

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