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Part IV ✦ Designing a CMS
Audiences and locality
Audiences and localities aren’t the same concept. An audience certainly may all reside in a
single locality, but an audience may also spread over a range of localities. I’ve heard some
people advocate dividing each locality into its own audience from the start. The idea is that
each locality exhibits such a different set of needs that it’s necessarily a different group. Well,
maybe, but then again, maybe not. I think that assuming that you always find big differences
between localities is just as wrong as assuming that all localities are the same (which is the
argument that people sometimes make to avoid localization altogether).
The chief lesson that audience analysis teaches you is not to assume anything but instead to
find out. Your best bet, I believe, is to define your audience segments based on the content
needs that you can identify and cater to. If those needs happen to divide people by language
or regional lines, fine. If not, that’s fine, too.
In any case, don’t confuse localization with audience. A Spanish-speaking person in Chile may
share more significant traits with a Russian speaker in Israel than with a Chilean in the next
office. Just because one can’t read Russian and the other can’t read Spanish doesn’t make
them two audiences. It makes them members of two localities.
Different audiences get different content. Different localities get the same content in
different ways.
Nonetheless, I choose the audience chapter as the spot for my major discussion of localiza-
tion for the following good reasons:
✦ You direct most localization toward an audience.
✦ Localities often are audiences.
✦ A localization analysis shares much in common with an audience analysis.
What gets localized?
Obviously, the main event of localization is translation. Translating text and tracking your
translations is a big job and may be all that you ever manage to do to localize your content.
As part of the translation or, better, as a part of the original authoring of your content, how-
ever, you want to consider the following more subtle communication conventions:
✦ Idioms: These conventions are word uses that are particular to a locality. The phrase
on the fly, for example, which I use frequently, isn’t in general use throughout the
English-speaking world and likely doesn’t even have a good translation in many other
languages. So to localize a phrase such as on the fly may require more than translating
the words. It may require more than finding the corresponding expression in the other
locality. It may require a reauthoring of the phrase to get its true meaning across in dif-
ferent localities.
✦ Metaphors: These conventions are phrases that use one set of circumstances to illus-
trate a similar relationship in another set of circumstances. In this book, for example, I
discuss the “wheel of content management.” The idea is that the relationships between
content-management entities is similar to that of the relationship between the parts of
a wheel. Does that metaphor make sense in all localities? I hope so! If not, a large sec-
tion of this book needs reauthoring to fix the problem.
✦ Connotations: These conventions are the additional nuances of meaning that you
ascribe to a word or phrase in addition to the main meanings that you find in a dictio-
nary. Meanings are fairly standard, but connotations vary widely by locality. I choose
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