i18n

I recently attended a conference sponsored by a market leader for localization workflow management software (guess this describes it best). Obviously localization is not just limited to software. All companies who are distributing their products globally will need to have it localized - and be it just the product information and/or documentation. (everybody knows the famous manuals you will get with your brand new asian consumer electronic piece you just bought). Hence the conference has been attended not only by vendors doing software translations - or companies providing the tools to do so - but by a variety of people dealing with different clients and customers, producing different things.

The interesting thing was not to meet all these different people - and exchange stories and experiences - but to understand, that they all share the same problems and issues when it comes to i18n: improper preparation of “a product” for global/local markets may lead to inefficiency during localization - which will result in higher costs. As long as we are talking about software, it is clear that the code needs to be internationalized before it can be localized (at least it should be clear to every developer). But why proper “i18n” for consumer products or manuals? Look at it this way: If you do not have the right or correct or complete information for a product you will have a hard time producing good quality localized results. If the input does not match the requirements of the tools you are using (if you are using tools; you really should!) the tools are useless - and again the results will be poor - or you have to invest a huge amount of manual resources and time to achieve the same results.

This being said, the requirement to have proper i18n before l10n is the same throughout the translation industry - no matter what they are translating. And a necessary step towards proper i18n is to make the translation a part in the product development life-cycle - just like QA, Design or all the other things important for the success of a product, regardless whether this is a piece of software or a toaster.