13.1. What Is Localization?

The first thing to work through is in what localization actually means to you and how it will be implemented in your application. What are you going to localize for your end users? Most developers think it is simply a matter of changing the text on the screen so that it is translated for the end user. This means that if you are offering your site in U.S. English, that you also offer it in another language such as Finnish or French based upon an end user preference.

It is true that text translation is one example of localizing a site, but there really is more to the picture than this. In addition to translating text, you also can change and work with the formatting of items such as date/time values, how numbers are represented, and how items sort within collections. In addition to this, you might also change images on the screen based upon a cultural setting.

For instance, in the financial services world, most cultures associate the color green as a good thing and the color red as a bad thing. When showing the up and down movements of a stock on the market, you will see green arrows for stocks that are moving up in value and red arrows for stocks that are moving down. These colors are actually specific to certain cultures.

For instance, in Japan, the opposite is true. In Japan, the color green is used to signify a negative trend, while the color red is used to signify a positive trend. In this case, the localization of the application that you might build would have to be localized to include the correct color indicators for stock movements. This point is important in that it is vital to remember that localization is not only about changing text but instead can be anything else as well. You will also need to take images, colors, and even features into account when localizing applications.