Internationalized products include all information needed for a product to be localized they are specially made for translator and localizers. In this sense globalization can be used instead of localization. The Microsoft term for internationalized product is “world-ready” (Pym, 2010, p. By internationalization, the localized product will be usable for any market in any language and culture. Internationalization without localization has no use. The benefit of internationalization is easier and faster localization (Pym, 2010, p.124). Pym believes “The ideology of internationalization nevertheless creates the illusion of a cultureــless technical world” (Pym, 2010, p.3) and he is right, it is just an illusion because in reality the world without culture is solid, hideous, unemotional and colorless. Some cultural elements, depending on the locale, should be added because an internationalized product is neutral. Internationalized products can not be used by people unless they are moderated to localized product. And this is very important in Economic Globalization whose aim is to release the product in many different locales at the same time (Pym 2010, P.124). Internationalization is a oneــtoــmany process: one internationalized phenomena can produce many localized products. When there is an internationalized version of a text, it can be localized in many targets. Consequently, he suggests that internationalization is not a proper term and it is better to be named interlocalization or delocalization (Pym 2010, p.124). That means internationalization occurs after the source text preparation and before localization. 123) also believes internationalization is the intermediary version of localized text. The result is a product localized in many languages without referring to the ST, just using the internationalized version and making the necessary changes based on the target users’ tastes and locale’s cultural and social situation.įrom LISA definition of internationalization, mentioned above, it can be concluded that internationalization is done before localization because it happens at the level of program design and document development. Through internationalization we broaden the use of the source, not their content. Internationalization is one precondition of localization. So, in most of the cases they are not internationalizeــable. In translating literary texts the situation is even worse, because nature of these texts is cultureـspecific if we omit cultural features there is nothing to say. It is obvious that we should take problematic elements out and replace them with proper ones.
Some even change to jargon among specialists in that field, but there are always some neologism and problematic terms too. Some of these technical terms become generic during time. In translating technical texts which have few culture-specific features, the problem of unــ generalizability occurs with terminologies and technical words. But this does not solve the problem completely, because we are not just talking about some ordinary texts. By generic elements we mean an element related to all locales and recognizable in all cultures. So, one way of generalizing a text is to remove its cultureــspecific elements and replace them with generic ones. Pym (2010) believes that internationalized texts supposed to be specific to noــculture. These parts mostly carry the cultureــspecific features. Generally, translation problems and difficulties appear in some common parts in all texts. Now the question is how a product can be generalized. 3).īased on the above definition, generalization is an important concept in internationalization. Internationalization takes place at the level of program design and document development” (LISA 1998, p.
Internationalization according to LISA is: “the process of generalizing a product so that it can handle multiple languages and cultural conventions without the need for redesign. With the rise of publicity of computer and internet usage in all aspects of people’s everyday life, these terms found their way in other fields of science and they are not limited to computer science anymore. Internationalization, as a concept related to localization, also originated in computer science. Localization was originally proposed in computer science.