White Paper Global Product Management Enterprise Software Localization
White Paper Global Product Management Enterprise Software Localization
White Paper
There continues to be considerable debate around the correct use of several terms - localization, globalization,
and internationalization. Globalization is now most often used in the context of taking a whole business to the
global market or the more general sense of markets themselves becoming more global.
According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the other two terms have the following meanings:
• Internationalization: the design and development of a product that is enabled for target audiences that
vary in culture, region, or language.
• Localization: the tailoring of a system to the individual cultural expectations of a specific target market
or group of individuals. Localization includes, but is not limited to, the translation of user-facing text and
messages.
The implication here is that the product first needs to be enabled for multiple markets (internationalization) and
then tailored specifically for each market (localization).
In this paper, we use the term localization to cover both activities for two reasons. First, the boundaries between
the two are somewhat blurred, and differentiating between them would appear to add no value. Secondly, as
we are only interested in the end goal, there seems no need to split them. And from a practical perspective, it
is very rare to be able to perform all of the internationalization tasks ahead of localization for any country, as we
shall see.
And if we agree that the product manager is ultimately responsible for the product that is delivered and its
adoption by users, then that product manager had better have a focus on localization.
This does not mean that product managers must know the specific requirements for every target market. What
they do need to understand are the areas to be considered, why they are important, and the need to engage
with local experts for the detail in each market.
should take place in any company with Market research Segmentation Product & portfolio strategy
products. Should localization become Customer research Propositions Vision & evangelising
Whether or not market entry is planned in advance or not, the job of localizing the product lands with the
Product Management team. So how should that team organize for localization?
All product managers should be knowledgeable about localization in general if relevant for their product.
And, when driving the development of their component of the product portfolio, the product manager
should have localization in mind so it does not become an afterthought. But then, for specific
markets, it makes sense to have product managers focused on those markets (often alongside their other
responsibilities). They will need to build a tight relationship with in-region resources such as the local sales
and services teams, partners, and customers, to understand the local requirements.
Where this is the case, the product manager needs to consider both the core product and all of the additional
elements that make up the whole or augmented product valued by the client. Are all these elements, e.g.,
integrated products, third-party products, professional services, and support teams, as well as marketing
collateral, proposal capabilities, documentation, training, implementation services, support capability, etc.,
available in all target markets?
Typically the product manager is not responsible for much of this, but without it, your product has a much lower
chance of success in new markets, and so it is in the product manager's best interest to work with stakeholders
both internally and externally to ensure a wholly localized product.
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Many languages also have variants – think of American English vs. English as used in the UK, Spanish spoken
in South America vs that spoken in Spain, or the French of France vs. that spoken in Quebec.
Language representation
Language is represented through its character set,
and it is irritating when a supposedly multilingual
product fails to properly support the accents or
additional letters of a particular language, such as
the German ß, French é, or Greek α. To facilitate this,
products should be built using the Unicode standard
for encoding. Any software written recently should
do so, but if you have any legacy code, beware.
Directionality
Another topic related to language that you should be aware of is directionality. In English and most languages,
we read and write from left to right across the page. But a few languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, are written
from right to left. Unless your product was built to support this capability originally, it is very difficult to retrofit and
will probably involve a redesign of your user interface. It is not as simple as mirroring the entire UI – for example,
some icons are reversed (like those indicating direction) while others are not (i.e., a clock, since clocks go clockwise
all over the world). And some text elements – such as a URL – will always display left to right.
Collation
The collation of data also introduces complexity. In English, having just 26 letters, the concept of alphabetical order
is very simple. But as soon as you start introducing accented characters, life gets more complicated with different
languages having different rules. For example, in German, the letter Ä is treated as a regular A when sorting, while
in Swedish, it is placed at the end of the alphabet. And when dealing with non-alphabetical languages (so-called
ideographic languages such as Chinese), the rules get more complex. If your product always relies on collation,
with support from the underlying tools such as the database or browser, you will probably not go far wrong. But
if your developers have implemented their own sort or comparison routines, they will likely have to be changed.
Text length
English is a fairly compact language, and so when translated into other Language Ratio
languages, the text will typically take up more room. This can cause problems, English 1.0
for example, with text displayed on buttons. The table to the right shows the
Korean 0.8
relative densities of various languages as a ratio.
Japanese 1.2
Translation Portuguese 2.6
Translation is a topic on its own and has spawned a huge industry of people
French 2.6
and technologies to handle it. Before making a choice on which to use,
ensure that all of the above topics are considered. German 2.8
Italian 3.0
The order in which personal names are written also varies. Here in the West, we tend to use the terms first name
and last name, which refer to their normal position in our culture. Better terms from a localization perspective
are given name and family name, and they should be placed on the screen in the order appropriate to the
location. Recently it was reported that one of the reasons that a major food delivery app was not well received
in Japan was that the app's UI had simply been translated, and the order of name and address fields was
confusing for local users.
Time zones
Time zones can present particular problems when
localizing. There are two challenges here. First,
handling dates and times that are entered and
displayed in local time zones – the classic example
being airline solutions where a plane can quite
legitimately land before it has taken off when
expressed in local time. And secondly, there is no
standard list of time zone abbreviations that you
can use. Common abbreviations such as CST have
different meanings in different parts of the world,
for example, Central Standard Time, China Standard
Time, or Cuba Standard Time. And then throw in
Daylight Saving Time (DST) for good measure!
A curious DST anomaly occurs within the continental
US, where the State of Arizona does not use
Daylight Saving, except within the Najavo Nation. As
a further twist, the Hopi Reservation is surrounded
by the Najavo Nation but does not use DST. So
a relatively short drive through this area can involve
four time zone changes!
Other
Many other business entities have different representations around the world. One example is paper sizes – a
global application will need to support both the international 'A' standard as well as US letter and legal sizes.
Another example is units of measure – while the metric system is in common use in most countries, there are
exceptions, such as in Burma, Liberia, and the US. A third example is telephone numbers, which, although
interpreted by the telephone network as a string of digits, are usually grouped according to local custom.
Many people will be aware of the long-running dispute between the US government and Microsoft over access
to emails stored on a server in Ireland. Under the US CLOUD Act, US law enforcement can compel US-based
companies to provide data stored on servers anywhere. This is very much in conflict with European data
protection rules if the data is about EU citizens. Until July of 2020, there was a mechanism known as the EU-US
Privacy Shield designed to mitigate the risks. But in that month, the European Court of Justice, in a case known
as Schrems II, found that the mechanism no longer provided a valid legal basis for data transfers from the EU
to the US. Now customers of US cloud service providers must themselves verify the data protection laws of the
recipient country, document the risk assessment, and confer with their own customers.
In late 2021, there was a news item about the lack of tracking information from container ships in and around
China which is adding to global supply chain challenges. The reason given was that those operating the
receiving stations on the Chinese coast are wary of the recently introduced Chinese data privacy laws, even
though no personal data is involved, and they are not passing on the data.
You also need to check that the product name (and even your company name) has not already been trademarked
in your target countries for a similar product. For example, an Australian software house in business in the UK
for around seven years received notification from a very large telecommunications company that their company
name violated a trademark they held. The telecoms company's legal department was probably larger than the
entire software company, so they were forced to rename and re-brand the company – a very expensive and
time-consuming exercise.
Color can have very different connotations AEX 713.34 +0.41% 日経平均 27,821.43 -205.82
around the world. For example, yellow is
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associated with good luck in Thailand but
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with pornography in China. And where we CAC 40 6,406.89 -0.02% 2,003.04 +13.98
in the West use red and green to indicate ISEQ 20 1,430.29 +0.58% 日経平均VI 21.98 -0.39
negative and positive, respectively, in some PSI 20 5,228.38 +0.13% 金標準先物 7,594 +80
Eastern cultures, the roles of the two colors
OSEBX 1,092.54 -0.40% ドバイ原油先物 73,020 +600
are reversed, as you can see from these two
screenshots from the Paris and Tokyo stock
exchanges. You can see more interesting
examples in this blog post by Shutterstock.
And, apologies if you're reading this in the UK and expect to see the spelling 'colour'. We've chosen to use
American English at Product Focus because a large proportion of our readers have English as a second language
and are more familiar with American English spelling. It would be nice to localize our content for every country,
but we've made the decision (rightly or wrongly) that the cost to do this is too high.
• Avoid using any graphics that use body parts – for example, the thumbs-up sign commonly used in the
West has a very different meaning in West Africa and the Middle East.
• The use of animals is to be discouraged as they often represent very different ideas in different cultures.
For example, a British company might use an Owl to represent learning, but the Owl depicts stupidity
in some parts of Asia.
• Always avoid religious symbols – this is why the Red Cross is known as the Red Crescent in many parts
of the world, even though the origin of the Red Cross symbol is not a religious one but a reversal of the
colors in the Swiss Flag in tribute to the founder of what became the Red Cross movement.
• Some icons could also be considered time-sensitive in that younger people may not recognize the
meaning as they originated in technology that no longer exists or is fast disappearing. Two good
examples are the Save and Mail icons in common use today.
Save Mail
For example, consider the widely used drop-down that lists countries. There is no definitive list of countries
agreed on by everyone. The most commonly cited number is 195, made up of the 193 UN member states
plus 2 observer states – the Holy See and Palestine. But that does not include either Taiwan or Kosovo, for
example, which are not recognized by the UN (having been vetoed) or Greenland or Hong Kong, which are
self-governing territories within other countries. You may have to use your own list, taking into account your
specific circumstances. For example, most online retailers do not include embargoed states such as Cuba, Iran,
and North Korea.
Aside from the list of names, it's also important to ensure country names are provided in the relevant language
of a multilingual user interface.
Second, but in the same vein, using maps can get you into trouble, as happened during the 2020
Olympic Games in Tokyo. The American broadcaster NBC displayed a map of China as part of its
coverage of the games. They received a formal complaint from the Chinese authorities because the map
did not include either Taiwan or the South China Sea, both of which China claims as part of their country.
In a further twist, it was announced that Netflix had removed two episodes of its drama Pine Gap in the Philippines
at the request of the government there because they included scenes showing a map that did include the
contested Chinese territory.
Here is some advice for product managers who are given the opportunity to take their product to international
markets.
If you are in the fortunate position of being the initial product manager when your product is first developed
and launched, then you have the opportunity to build a product that is world-ready from the start by ensuring
that the 'internationalization' aspects of localization are incorporated into the first release. However, you
are likely to be under pressure to launch in your home market as fast as possible, and the additional cost
and time involved in complete internationalization are unlikely to be approved. But that does not mean that
you should ignore them. Ensuring that all team members are aware of localization issues can prevent some
costly mistakes at this early stage of product development.
Then you must build your plan. While it should be integrated with other aspects of your product plan, it is worth
being able to easily pull out all of the components related to localization, perhaps separated by target market.
Localization can be an expensive process, particularly if you have a significant amount of technical debt to be
cleared. And senior management may not be expecting this cost and effort. After all, your product has been very
successful in your home market, so surely all that you need to do is to translate it? Be prepared to put forward a
robust cost justification as part of your plan.
Enterprise Product
Localization
References
Most existing books on software localization are aimed at developers and are now rather old (pre-Unicode,
for example). However, the books on page 16, while of a more general nature, will be of interest to product
managers.
Language
• Which additional languages will you need to support? And which variants?
• Was the product built with translation in mind?
• Does the product support Unicode throughout its architecture?
• Can it support right to left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic (if applicable)?
• Has all text been externalized to support translation?
Data representation
• Does the product support the concept of locale?
• Do all dates, times, numbers, etc., when displayed, use the locale?
• Do you have time zone support, including handling of daylight saving?
• Can the UI be configured to accommodate name, address, etc., formats?
Local requirements
• Do you have a local partner identified – reseller or systems integrator?
• Have you investigated local requirements? Either through partners, customers, or other research?
• Have you checked the meaning of your product's name in other languages? And not just using the usual
spelling – what other words does it sound like elsewhere?
• Have you checked for trademarks in other countries?
[1] Truly Global: The Theory and Practice of Bringing Your Company
to International Markets by Anna Navarro Schlegel
[3] Culture Map: Decoding How People Think Lead and Get Things
Done Across Cultures by Erin Meyer
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