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Part IV ✦ Designing a CMS
✦ Difficulty: Localization is hard. It adds a lot of complexity to an already complex sys-
tem. Variations in language and especially variations in content structure combine to
drive up the effort and, in turn, the cost of a localized CMS.
In a rapidly globalizing world, staying ignorant of the need to localize for very long is difficult.
And indeed, over the course of my time in the computer-information field, I’ve seen the con-
sciousness and understanding of localization grow from a few voices to a full discipline and
industry.
A CMS can’t help you much in raising the consciousness of your organization about the need
to localize, but it can deal quite effectively with the difficulty of localization. You can hand off
a lot of the effort and organization that surrounds localization to a CMS. A CMS can organize
the localization effort, but it can’t do the localization. That requires people. So, although a
CMS can make localization a lot easier, it remains an expensive and slow process.
I claim no great expertise in localization. I’ve seen more aborted attempts at localization than
I have successes. So my goal in this discussion isn’t to present a comprehensive account of
localization or to survey the current trends, but rather to present a set of concepts and
vocabulary around localization that I can weave into the fabric of my wider discussions of
content management.
What is localization?
Localization is the process of making content as understandable as possible in the variety of
cultures in which people view it. I’m going to work back from this definition to one that’s
more useful in the context of a CMS.
The definition has the following three major concepts:
✦ Culture: I want to keep this very complex issue as simple as possible and define culture
as a set of shared communication and behavior standards that a group of people adopts
and upholds. Not all that long ago, geography was the main indicator of culture. People
who lived near each other shared a culture. Today, that’s too simple a way to look at it.
As anyone who’s walked down the street in any major city of the world can tell you, cul-
tures aren’t countries. Today, I’d define culture as a dynamic mix of language, region,
ethnicity, and other affiliations. However, to stay within the general bounds of the
accepted localization terminology, I use the word locality and not culture to capture the
concept of localization. This has validity in the software development (and larger busi-
ness) world, where often local subsidiaries of a company are responsible for handling
the marketing of company products for their locality.
✦ Understanding: What makes content as understandable as possible? Clearly the lan-
guage in which you write any text is the biggest factor. But it’s not just language. As I
discuss in the following section, translation is only the start. You must recognize and
change a world of other, more subtle local conventions.
✦ Process: Localization is a process. In fact, I’d say that, by and large, it’s an authoring
process. The content that someone authors for one locality, someone else must then
reauthor for another. The localization process encompasses many mechanical parts,
where bits of content move from person to person for processing. But after the content
arrives on the localizer’s screen, the mechanics end and it becomes a human process
of knowing what works in one locality or the other.
Note
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