Internationalization and Translatability

INTERNATIONALIZATION AND TRANSLATABILITY David Kumhyr, Carla Merrill, Karin Spalink Internationalization and Translation Services, Inc. 3503 Stonegate Drive Durham, NC 27705-5480 tel: 919-490-4963 fax: 919-490-2069 email: 70720.1406@compuserve.com Abstract Marketing to a global clientele requires adaptation to the clientele's locale. Adaptation can be built into the production process or it can be achieved through more costly and time-consuming retrofitting. Local standards, cultural aspects and the meaning of symbols and icons have to be observed and incorporated; in other words, production for a global marketplace should be done with translation in mind. Translation considerations vary depending on the translation means to be employed. 1 Introduction What is internationalization and who needs it? Internationalization, sometimes confused with localization, has not yet become a household word. It still has the aura of the far-away and maybe even the exotic. It sounds like something that everybody else needs, not us. In fact that is exactly the point, however, we are the ones who have to provide it, if we want to be viable players in the global marketplace. More and more, companies cater to more than one locale, and percentages of revenue from sales in foreign countries are growing from year to year [Taylor 92]. "The globalization of economic activity is perhaps the defining trend of our time" [O'Hara-Devereaux & Johansen 94]. To profit from participation in the global marketplace, a product has to meet the requirements of the selected target markets. And to maximize those profits, the product has to be prepared and designed to facilitate adaptation to the various markets. This preparation is called internationalization or enabling. The adaptation to the various individual markets or locales is called localization. The localization process itself is independent of the state of internationalization of a product. The costs that are incurred during localization of products that have not been internationalized (called retrofitting) are typically many times higher than the costs that are incurred for localization of enabled products. The question of internationalizing is, in essence, not a matter of convenience or aesthetics but one of economics [Hall 93]. What is translatability and how is it used? Translatability is usually expressed as an index or factor to represent the complexity of a given text. Text complexity may be defined for a particular environment, for example, a language direction or a machine translation system. Since it is a relative measurement no absolute measurement parameters can be given. Some of the most common parameters used are: sentence length, nested clauses, and homographs [Gdaniec 93]. If 142 the text is measured for translation by a machine translation system, text-external factors like tables, graphics, and file format may be included in the accounting of translatability also. The translatability index indicates the text's suitability for translation processing. It may be used to estimate the time and effort (cost) it will take to translate the document. 2 Internationalization Factors Product internationalization is not a process in itself but it is one aspect that has to be considered at each step of the production process, …

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