Localization versus Internationalization

Do you know the difference between localizing and internationalizing? Most people can go their entire lives without knowing it, but there is a useful distinction.

You localize your product when you customize it to the needs of a particular market, usually on geographic and linguistic bounds. So if you're Toyota, and you want to sell cars in California, you need to equip them with the more robust emission control systems required by law there. Or, if you want to sell them in UK, you need to build them with the steering wheel on the right-hand side.

What you soon discover, though, is that it's prohibitively expensive to create and maintain separate production lines for California, UK and other foreign markets, not to mention your domestic market. The challenge then becomes to properly internationalize your product so that the changes needed for each market cause as little disruption as possible to your production process. You design your cars so that there is some irreducible core that is the same, no matter where the car will be sold.

This is easier said than done, but in a technology company, where production lines move extremely fast - because it's all just software - it's important to bite the internationalization bullet early and often. The alternatives are multiple, straggler code lines; separate Web sites; and unintegrated, unwieldy sets of documentation.

So, when all about you are losing their heads over localization (L10n), you can be the calm voice of reason, asking whether the product is really ready for localization yet, or whether your colleagues should pause and think internationalization (I18n) first.

(Note: The term g l o b a l i z a t i o n is also used to describe the overall process of creating products for worldwide markets. The problem, in our search-engine-optimized day and age, is that the same term applies to the assimilation of national character and identity into the worldwide market, with undesirable ramifications to the disenfranchised. It's not wrong to talk about g l o b a l i z i n g your product, but if you go searching for information on localization, don't use the g-word.)