Translation and Web Localization

Miguel A. Jimenez-Crespo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134082186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Web localization is a cognitive, textual, communicative and technological process by which interactive web texts are modified to be used by audiences in different sociolinguistic contexts.

Translation and Web Localization provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview into this emerging field of study. The book covers the key areas and main theoretical and practical approaches of the subject, rather than a step by step practical guide. Topics covered include the often controversial definition of localization, how the process develops, what constitutes a text in this process, digital genre theory and its implications, and how to conduct research or training in this field.

The book concludes with a look into the dynamic nature of web localization and the forces, such as crowdsourcing, that are reshaping web localization and translation as we know it.

In light of the deep changes brought by the Internet, Translation and Web Localization is an indispensable book for researchers, postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students of translation studies, as well as practitioners and researchers in related fields such as computational linguistics, applied linguistics, Internet linguistics, digital genre theory and web development.

Part I
Technology, Localization and Translation: Evolving Conceptualizations

1
The Emergence of Localization

DOI: 10.4324/9780203520208-3

This chapter charts the origins of localization and the different perspectives and views of the last two decades. It provides a critical comprehensive summary of the conceptualizations, metaphorizations and metalanguage of localization from both Translation Studies (TS) and industry sides, and of how both have struggled to define localization either as a distinct process or as a technological extension of translation-related phenomena. We will explore issues related to the evolution of localization, definitions from industry and academic perspectives and also industry-based attempts to differentiate from ‘standard' translation. We will also review how TS have incorporated web localization within the discipline, and we will discuss whether localization represents a new paradigm within TS (Pym 2010).

Technology and the Emergence of Localization

During the last two decades we have witnessed a continued growth of the Internet that now permeates all aspects of our modern lives. The Internet gave rise to the World Wide Web, and both have been revolutionizing human communication and helping interconnect the world in ways never seen before (Folaron 2010). The possibilities afforded by the Internet have opened new forms of digital communication and, consequently, different types of new translation-mediated practices. Among these we find ‘localization', a global cycle of processes that makes digital texts available to different sociolinguistic communities around the world. Localization as we know it started in the late 1970s when US computer companies brought their products to major markets such as France, Germany and Japan. These initial attempts resulted in the emergence of the now consolidated ‘localization industry', the fastest-growing sector in translation. By the 1980s and 1990s, this industry had expanded to cover all sorts of digital texts that billions around the world use daily, from websites and videogames to smartphones and MP3 players. Web localization brought the largest expansion to this industry, a market that currently amounts to over $3 billion worldwide. The growth in this sector is hardly surprising considering the over 2000 billion Internet users (Internet World Stats 2012) and the almost 700 billion active websites in June 2012. ¹ Over the years, localization has been consolidated as (1) a separate and attractive market niche, (2) a specific specialization within the translation industry and (3) an exciting new field of inquiry that is evolving into the emerging so-called ‘Localization Studies' (Remael 2010; Munday 2012). Localization has also opened up a fascinating field of inquiry for many interrelated disciplines, such as Computational Linguistics, Communication Studies, International Business Management, Software and Web Development, Web Usability, Digital Genre Theory and Translation Studies.

Digital technologies play a key role in localization. Since the early days, the rapid pace at which these technologies develop forced the industry to continually adapt to new innovations and the challenges they posed. Since the first stumbling blocks faced were technological problems related to the integration of translation in software products, conceptualizations of localization often bypassed mainstream translation types to stress the technological component as the main distinguishing feature. These issues still dominate discussions about localization, even though it has become the object of study in a number of disciplines. This first chapter is devoted to an analysis of the evolution of localization and a review of the different conceptualizations and discourses that have arisen over the years, attempting to build bridges between practical and academic approaches.

The Origins of Localization

The origins of localization can be traced back to the emergence of personal computing and software in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Such technologies started to become popular among users who did not possess programming skills, and as a result many US computing companies set out to address their needs in a comprehensive manner (Esselink 2006). Once companies such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle or Microsoft had succeeded in popularizing their products in the US, they turned their eyes towards international markets; the initial targets were Japan and the so-called FIGS countries (France, Italy, Germany and Spain). Economic reasons are therefore easily identifiable as the main driver for the emergence and evolution of localization. Emerging originally in the United States, localization processes initially flowed from English into other languages (Uren et al. 1993). However, with the emergence of the WWW localizations started to flow in the opposite direction, with a constant stream of websites being localized into English around the world. Nowadays, it is commonplace across the planet to find websites localized into that international lingua franca in order to address global audiences.

Developers initially attempted to introduce established translation practices, hiring experienced ‘linguists' to help with the translation of textual strings. The first attempts at localization entailed developers finishing the programming of a software product and handing down the extracted textual strings in resource files with the supporting documentation to linguists. Once the translations were completed, developers would try to reintegrate them later. All interested parties soon discovered that separating the development from the translation stages was impractical for a variety of reasons. For example, translated segments were normally longer than source texts and could not be fitted in the space allotted for them; frequently, textual strings would include code (the so called ‘hard-coded strings') that could not be translated when target locales required specific number, gender or declension agreements; dealing with these types of textual strings required a basic understanding of programming, etc. With time, the realization that localization had to be collaboratively conceived from the start of the development cycle resulted in what is now known as the GILT process or Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation (see Chapter 2), in which developers, managers, localization engineers, localizers and/or translators actively collaborate to ensure the global localization process, normally working side by side (Dunne 2006a; Gouadec 2007).

From the business point of view, companies initially relied both on in-house translation teams (Microsoft or Oracle) or outsourced their translation-related tasks to translation vendors, mostly rebranded translation companies. The 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of world localization hubs, such as Ireland, where companies established their localization headquarters thanks to government tax incentives and a very positive and competitive labour market environment (Esselink 2006). Although by the 1990s the localization service industry was clearly consolidated, companies soon found it unprofitable to maintain ever-growing localization departments within each organization (Mazur 2007), and Multi-Language Vendors (MLV) that normally worked with large multi-language projects thus emerged. Often, new target languages were offered and requested, and these constant expansions meant that MLV often had to depend on Single Language Vendors (SLV) to meet the need for an ever-expanding range of locales or languages. The 1990s and 2000s also saw a wave of mergers and acquisitions reshape the localization industry. Currently, new companies are emerging online in a push to offer quicker and more economic services by combining professional translators, post-editing machine translation and volunteer communities on the web (see Chapter 8).

Web localization emerged after years of successful efforts in software products. Initially, processes developed for software localization were modelled to the specifics of digital hypertexts (Yunker 2003, 2010; Dunne

2006a). Web localization surpassed the market share of software localization in the early 2000s (LISA 2004; Schäler 2005), ² resulting in a ‘lucrative, dynamic and interprofessional field, often involving marketing, design, software engineering, as well as linguistic processes' (Pym and Windle 2011a: 410). It also started to become a specific translation modality that required specific skills from translators and a lower degree of technological competence than software localization (Esselink 2006). Thus web localization has been open from the beginning to a wider range of translation professionals. The complexity of maintaining multilingual dynamic websites led to the creation of new technologies to author, manage, store and publish web content, such as the Content Management Systems (CMS) or Global Management Systems (GMS) (Yunker 2003: 355; LISA 2006). These technologies emerged from translation memory systems and are used to handle the dynamism of multilingual web projects in which content is continually updated and published. These technologies have helped tremendously to simplify these types of multilingual projects and keep costs down for the industry (Lynch 2006).

New technological developments, such as adding software functionalities, the move to the ‘cloud' ³ with Software as service (Saas) ⁴ models, apps or widgets, are now blurring the boundaries between the more technical expertise required for software localization and the more content-oriented nature of web localization. ⁵ The present and future of web localization therefore seems more and more complex, with the Internet merging platform and content, and therefore, one could argue that software and web localization may quite possibly merge in the future.

The Internet, the Www and Web Localization

Web localization needs to be conceptualized in relation to the Internet, the most important development in communication since Gutenberg invented the printing press in the fifteenth century (Lockwood and Scott 2000). This global communicative platform has promoted the emergence of new business practices and models (LISA 2007: 5), revolutionizing translation practices globally and leading to the emergence of the subject of this volume. The Internet represents an essential medium of communication in a globalized world, with ever-increasing user counts and penetration rates. According to Internet World Stats, ⁶ the number of users world-wide was around two billion in 2012, reaching 30.2% of the total population. In North America or Europe the percentage of the population using the Internet is 78.2% and 58.2% respectively. In this context, the presence of businesses on the web is currently a prerequisite for competing in a globalized market. It has also meant that most organizations, collectives and individuals also have a web presence through websites or profiles in different social or directory websites.

In the 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee created what we call today the World Wide Web (WWW), defined by him as ‘the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge' (Berners-Lee et al. 1992: 52). This definition stresses the most important characteristics of the WWW, its hypertextual and networked nature. The terms ‘Internet' and ‘WWW' are often confused and interchanged, even when the WWW is merely one of the many communicative situations enabled by the Internet (O'Hagan and Ashworth 2003), such as chats, videoconferencing and new online SMS apps in smartphones. The WWW was possible thanks to the emergence in 1991 of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), as well as to later technical innovations, such as the Extensive Hypertext Markup Language in 2005. The Web 2.0 and beyond continues to expand the meteoric rise of web localization processes (Fernández Costales 2011), mostly due to the collaboration of users who are creating and translating massive amounts of content. Berneers-Lee highlighted from the start the social nature of the WWW: ‘The web is more a social creation than a technical one' (Berners-Lee 2000: 113), thus forecasting the boom of the social network era. The ReadWriteWeb, as Berners-Lee refers to the Web 2.0, has brought new collaboration capabilities, resulting in alternative localization practices for existing business models: localization of open-source software, subtitling of online videos or volunteer localization of websites (see Chapter 8).

Defining Localization

Local...

Table of contents

• Translation and Web Localization
• Translation and Web Localization
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Technology, Localization and Translation: Evolving Conceptualizations
• 1 The Emergence of Localization
• 2 The Web Localization Process
• Part II Current Issues in Localization Research
• 3 Web Localization and Text
• 4 Web Localization and Digital Genres
• 5 Web Localization and Quality
• 6 Web Localization and Empirical Research
• Part III Localization and the Future
• 7 Web Localization and Training
• 8 Future Perspectives in Localization
• Notes
• References
• Index