Localisation vs internationalisation

Internationalisation is usually abbreviated to i18n (as there are 18 letters between the letters ‘l’ and ‘n’). It denotes the packaging of the strings used in software so that the corresponding strings from a user’s language can be deployed without impacting the functionality of the application. Apart from that, internationalisation is a set of practices followed by developers so that the application presents information and/or processes as per the expectations of the target users. Localisation, for most common usage, is concerned with translating the menu strings and application messages to the users’ desired language. This requires a good knowledge of the target language, and a style guide for translation. For documentation localisation, a good command of the language and translation skills will also be needed.

As can be seen from the chart (Figure 3), localisation and internationalisation are closely interlinked, so work on both never ends. As long as software or the software environment changes, localisation work continues. This also explains why, while there are so many languages spoken in the world, localisation is limited to a smaller subset of them. of Rangoli 1.0 beta in 2005, supporting several languages. Other teams brought out language-specific Linux distributions around the same time. The language support became part of mainstream distributions like Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu over the years. When Ubuntu 11.04 was released on April 28, 2011, it included boot-time local support for the following Indian languages apart from English: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Tamil and Telugu.

FUEL: Frequently Used Entries for Localisation (FUEL) was initiated by Rajesh Ranjan to improve the quality of localisation, by standardising the translations for most common words or phrases. Twelve languages have been part of the initiative.

Microsoft’s initiative: Windows 7 has been released with support for 95 languages. For Indian languages, Microsoft has a language portal called Bhashaindia, through which it enables users of its products to participate in localisation.