An Introduction to Website and Software Localization
Basic terminology of website globalization contains terms like internationalization, localization, and translation at the top of the list. Today, we have picked localization to give an analytical understanding of and also of its two major expansions: software and website localization.
What is localization?
Before jumping to website or software localization let us clear up what it is. Localization involves converting the apparent features of a website or a software such as web-pages, desktop, words, user interface, etc into an understandable language of a specific locality of the visitors. The purpose behind that is to bring the attention of potential locale-specific customers to some product or software in order to expand the marketing spectrum. Localization is an important constituent of software or web-platform globalization.
Website localization
Website localization is distinguished from software localization in terms of contents to be converted and the purposes at the bottom of it. Mostly, websites are developed into English, and there are peoples in the world who are not familiar with it either because of their illiteracy or they consider it unnecessary to learn (like Chinese people). Hence, to get a website in an intelligible form for them, it is necessary to outsource website localization services. It not only aims at converting it to locale-specific language, but also renders services to let you create multi-lingual websites to enhance the scope of your marketing to a remarkable extent.
Software localization
The same criteria of services are applied to software localization as discussed for websites. However, the divergence comes when we say that the localization has mainly to do with the conversion of software for a targeted community. Most of software developers having made a research on the habits and trends of a particular area, assume their developed software right in keeping with their needs. So, to get it usable for their targeted customers, it is essential for them to get it localized so that it appears locale-friendly. For this purpose, they have to, and they do consult a localization agency and provide them a software localization kit with the full details of their requirements.