Suppose someone is working for a company that, until now, has operated exclusively in the United States. However, the company is now opening a major office in China and needs a Chinese-language website. The company offers the same products and services in both countries with only some minor differences, but perhaps some of the elements that appeared in the original website targeted at the United States are offensive or upsetting in China (use of flags, colors, nationalistic images, songs, etc.). Thus, that company might lose a potential market because of small details of presentation.
Furthermore, this company might need to adapt the product to its new buyers; video games are the best example.[5][6]
Now, suppose instead that this company has major offices in a dozen countries and needs a specifically designed website in each of these countries. Before deciding how to localize the website and the products offered in any given country, a professional in the area might advise the company to create an overall strategy: to globalize the way the organization does business. The company might want to design a framework to codify and support this global strategy. The globalization strategy and the globalization framework would provide uniform guidance for the twelve separate localization efforts.
Globalization is especially important in mitigating extra work involved in the long-term cycle of localization. Because localization is a cycle and not a one-time project, there will always be new texts, updates, and projects to localize. For example, as the original website is updated over time, each of the localized websites already translated will also need to be updated. This cycle of work is continuous as long as the original project continues to evolve. It is therefore important for globalization processes to be created and streamlined in order to implement ongoing changes.
No comments:
Post a Comment