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Chapter 25 ✦ Cataloging Audiences
the word component, for example, to describe classes of content partly for its connota-
tion to me. I remember creating a stereo system out of what are generally known as
components. Each component is sold separately, but together they make a wonderful
sound.
✦ References: These conventions are specific mentions of people, things, or events that
you use to make a point. I frequently refer to Amazon (at
www.amazon.com), for exam-
ple, hoping that it’s an example that’s known to my audience regardless of locality. I
suspect that I’m right, but then, I wouldn’t know if I was wrong.
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it gives you a feeling for the kind of conventions that localization
involves beyond simple translation. To continue, I turn now to the hot spots (yet another
idiomatic expression) of localization, as the following list describes:
✦ Look-and-feel: In publications, you spend a lot of time figuring out how to make your
publications communicate certain emotions and intangible ideas. This area may be
the most locality-bound part of a CMS. What color, imagery, sound, and text style com-
municates which emotion varies a lot from locality to locality. What in one locality says
“elegant” may, in a different locality, say “bizarre!”
✦ Messages: These concepts are the key ideas that you want a user to take away from
your publications. (See Chapter 26, “Designing Publications,” in the section “Messages.”)
Messages are locality bound. The immediate message especially, which you communi-
cate as much by look-and-feel as by words, may not map well between localities.
✦ Tone: A general tone (casual, formal, official, friendly, and so on) is often hard to repli-
cate across localities without major reauthoring. In this book, for example, I try to
maintain a casual and friendly tone. In some localities, such a tone may very well read
as disrespectful or even comical.
✦ Examples: You use examples to bring a concrete and tangible reference to bear on an
abstract concept. As references, examples are locality bound. Examples must address
the experience of your audience but must also make sense to your various localities.
✦ Illustrations: You use illustrations to summarize complex concepts or capture the
essence of the text around them. Aside from the fact that illustrations are technically
much harder to translate, you can embed a lot of local context in illustrations that
can make them confusing outside their locality of origin. I use a picture of a “standard”
organizational chart, for example, to discuss information flow in the organization. (See
Chapter 14, “Working within the Organization,” in the section “Tracking Information
Flow in the Organization.”) If that “standard” chart is unknown in your locality, in no
way does my illustration help you to understand the concept. In fact, it’s likely to con-
fuse you more.
Localization and content management
Localization and content management go hand in hand. In fact I’d go so far as to say that the
central issues of localization are among the central issues of content management, as the fol-
lowing list discusses:
✦ Collection: How do you author or acquire content in a way that frees it from its context
by explicitly stating its context? For localization, you make content free from its locality
by tagging the parts that are locality bound. In content management in general, you
make content free from any particular audience or publication by tagging the places
that are audience- or publication-specific. In both cases, you’re not trying to remove
the context of the content but rather to explicitly state it so that you can formulate and
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