Key Differences Between Localization vs Internationalization in Software Development
Have you ever wondered how giant global companies such as Amazon span the world while still feeling highly personalized to a specific region or culture? The answer is a unique blend of localization and internationalization. From well-known food brands such as McDonald’s or Starbucks to technology platforms like Instagram, localization and internationalization play key roles in brand expansion and growth.
For technology brands, localization and internationalization are equally important in bringing software and platforms to audiences. It allows them to reach new customers, enter new markets, increase customer satisfaction and engagement, and increase business revenue. These concepts allow technology brands to successfully deliver a stable, delightful product to different regions and cultures.
What is the Difference Between Internationalization and Localization?
Internationalization refers to the idea of preparing products or services for a diverse, global market. These global audiences might have different needs, pain points, and challenges that the product will solve. It’s important for a business to develop go-to-market strategies with multiple personas in mind. Internationalization often pushes for divergence from solely focusing on the “home” market to thinking globally instead. This allows a product or service to be used across languages, devices, cultures, and regions, making it “culture-neutral.”
On the other hand, localization refers to adapting software and platforms across languages and cultural requirements without the users feeling a barrier. This involves changing words, phrases, or other linguistics to better align with a culture’s customs or preferences. Localization also goes beyond language and can focus on time and date differences, appropriate images and visuals, cultural hand gestures, and other forms of written and nonverbal communication.
Because it occurs one time, internationalization typically offers more of a fixed cost, whereas localization might need to be budgeted for again and again.
What is the Similarity Between Localization and Internationalization?
These concepts are often two sides of the same coin; they both focus on a specific way to bring a product to an international and diverse market. They both support globalization, a business concept where organizations operate on a worldwide scale for customers around the globe. By combining these concepts when building a technology platform, businesses can create an easy springboard for globalization, capturing more market share and gaining a competitive edge.
How to Internationalize and Localize a Product
Internationalization typically happens one time at the creation of a product or service, creating a flexible, solid foundation for future expansion. The internationalization process usually creates placeholders, enables cultural formatting, and organizes the source code. Software internationalization is complex and doesn’t come without challenges for full stack developers, like budgeting and timing constraints, understanding cultural differences, and paying close attention to nuances. Tools such as APIs, webhooks, in-context editing, pseudo localization, and readily maintained code repositories keep products flexible and adaptable for localization.
Depending on how many regions or cultures you’re expanding into, localization can happen over and over again, an infinite number of times.
Localization vs Internalization Examples
To better understand these concepts, here are a few examples.
1. An internationalized and localized payments processing platform
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Pretend you’ve built a payments technology platform that is properly internationalized. Your engineering team might have built the product from the ground up to suit different languages, user experiences, and more.
Now, it’s time to expand specifically into Arabic markets. In these languages, reading is done from right to left, the complete opposite of the “home” language of English. Not only does the entire interface need to support a different language, but it also needs to support a written structure that is entirely flipped. If your platform was properly localized, the engineers would’ve built this right-to-left reading structure into the code.
2. A project management software
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Project management software options like Asana, Trello, and ClickUp are popular around the world. While founded in the U.S., they’ve successfully been adopted worldwide. Internationalization means the platform foundations are built with the flexibility to accommodate ways of working across cultures. When localizing a project management platform, the software should be flexible enough to offer different time and date zones during project workflows, different units of measurement, or different currencies.
Work with Advantis Global for the Top 1% of Tech Talent
For highly skilled engineering and software development talent that makes internationalization and localization possible, it’s critical to work with an expert IT staffing agency. Not every talent agency focuses on the top IT talent, and when dealing with critical software infrastructure, it’s vital that the team understands the complexities. For companies looking to source top tech talent, talk to a recruiting expert.
