Babylon Consult

Software localization

What is software localization?

Software localization is the process through which a product is adjusted to the linguistic, cultural and technical requirements of a certain market. This process demands a lot of work from the development team and often takes plenty of time.

What is the difference between software localization and traditional translation of documents?

Software localization means translating and adjusting software or a web product, including the software itself and the whole documentation regarding the product.
Traditional translation is, usually, an activity which occurs after finalizing the source document. Instead, software localization projects are often conducted simultaneously with the development of the source product, in order to allow the simultaneous delivery.  For instance, the translation of the texts concerning a programme may start while the product is still in the beta phase of development.
Translation is only one of the activities of a localization project- there are other tasks, such as project management, software engineering, testing and desktop publishing.

Which is the standard software localization process?

A software product which was localized appropriately looks and feels like a product that was written and conceived namely for the respective market. Here we listed only a few things which must be considered, apart from the language itself, in order to efficiently locate a software product or a web page: units of measurement, numeric formats, address formats, date and time formats, paper size, fonts, font implicit selection, differences between lower case and upper case characters, sets of characters, sorting, word separation and hyphen, legal regulations, copyrights, data protection, ways of payment, foreign exchange rates, taxes.

The standard localization process consists of the following basic steps:
• Analysis of the received material and estimation of the tools and resources required by the localization of the application.
• Cultural, technical and linguistic assessment
• Creation and update of term glossaries
• Translation in the target language
• Adjustment of the interface for the user, including size reconfiguration of the forms and dialogs, according to the request.
• Localization of graphics, scripts and other media containing visible text, symbols etc.
• Compilation and creation of the files localized for testing
• Providing functional and linguistic quality
• Handing in the project

We are at your disposal for further information and references.

The Babylon Consult translators and interpreters team consists of passionate professionals, native speakers, specialized in this domain.  We use CAT Tools, which support intellectual effort through the accuracy of the translation memory.