Making the Words and Pictures Make Sense

Have you ever read a user's manual for an appliance or a toy that was poorly converted word for word from another language? "Put in a bolt number five past through green bar and tighten no loose to nut." Got it?

That's a poor translation, and it's what software can look like to a non-English speaker if little effort is put into building the software for foreign languages. It's easy to individually convert all the words, but to make the overall instructions meaningful and useful requires much more work and attention.

Good translators can do that. If they're fluent in both languages, they can make the foreign text read as well as the original. Unfortunately, what you'll find in the software industry is that even a good translation isn't sufficient.

Take Spanish, for example. It should be a simple matter to convert English text to Spanish, right? Well, which Spanish are you referring to? Spanish from Spain? What about Spanish from Costa Rica, Peru, or the Dominican Republic? They're all Spanish, but they're different enough that software written for one might not be received well by the others. Even English has this problem. There's not just American English, there's also Canadian, Australian, and British English. It would probably seem strange to you to see the words colour, neighbour, and rumour in your word processor.

What needs to be accounted for, besides the language, is the region or localethe user's country or geographic area. The process of adapting software to a specific locale, taking into account its language, dialect, local conventions, and culture, is called localization or sometimes internationalization. Testing the software is called localization testing.