When new phenomena appear, people tend to fold those fresh realities into the frameworks they already use, which softens the lines between concepts and opens up debate across fields. Localization is no exception, and the way scholars and practitioners frame it keeps shifting in both industry and TIS research.
Among the translation concepts studied for how the industry understood them, the term “localization” drew the sharpest disagreement among the people surveyed (Johnson & LaPlante, 2015). It also turned out to be one of the ideas that generated the most friction between respondents. The cluster of phenomena that sits where localization meets globalization has produced a set of competing labels, including “glocalization”, “reverse localization”, “de-localized or internationalized texts”, and “website globalization”. That first term, “glo-calization”, shows up mostly in marketing and business settings, though translation studies borrows it too. Over time the discipline has produced several different ways of framing it. “Glocalization” tries to bridge the two poles of a spectrum: cultural studies, along with international marketing and business thinking, treats localization as a top-down move toward the “local”, while a parallel “globalization” move works either to flatten the local through standardization or to localize for a worldwide market. That second move is sometimes read as pushing Western values onto everyone else. The emphasis there falls on stripping away features of the culture that made the product, replacing them with a supposedly neutral “international” standard. Some researchers instead use “globalization” to describe how global English gets applied worldwide in localization work, producing “international” editions aimed at a broad audience. In their work on localizing software for global crises and emergencies, Musacchio and Panizzon note that English frequently serves as a lingua franca to open content up to an international readership (2018).
“Reverse localization” is a layered idea that actually covers two separate things. Schäler coined the term to describe products that deliberately build in foreign features as a way to reach particular locales (Schäler, 2005). This is not the same as the “foreignization” strategy Venuti championed, because here non-local elements are added on purpose to produce a specific effect (Venuti, 1995). Picture an advertisement that uses a foreign face or accent to suggest sophistication or a modern feel. The second meaning of “reverse localization” points to Japanese video games that get adapted for the North American market and are later sold back in Japan in English with Japanese subtitles. That lets the original Japanese players experience a version carrying changes made for foreign audiences, something that can be seen as part of “fandom cultures” (O”Hagan, 2009).
“De-localization”, also called “internationalization”, is another idea worth understanding in this space. Pym argues that the language industry routes the localization process through a go-between stage called the “internationalized version” instead of jumping straight to “local” adaptation (Pym, 2013). The point of this “de-localized” or “glocalized” source is to strip out features that depend on a particular language or culture, which makes later translation easier and speeds up the parallel rollout of many language versions. The industry calls this “simship”, a routine practice for releasing software or video game versions in several languages at once (Esselink, 2000). Relay interpreters at international bodies have leaned on an interlingua such as English for a long time, yet Pym points out that source texts had never before been deliberately written for translation or localization, which is what makes “internationalized texts” a genuinely new entry in the field (Pym, 2013). Pym also pushes back on the internationalization and globalization mindset for fostering the illusion of a technical world with no culture in it (Pym, 2013). Tymoczko takes a similar line from a post-colonial and cultural angle, asking how genuinely two-way cultural exchange can really be in a globalized era, and whether gaps in power, resources, and technology turn “cultural exchange” into a polite word for absorbing Western or dominant international norms rather than any real give-and-take between cultures (Tymoczko, 2002).
Internationalization sits at the heart of localization and pulls together technical, cultural, and linguistic angles that smooth the path for the work that follows. Industry talk often holds that good internationalization depends on cultural neutrality, yet plenty of scholars point out that this middle stage, the so-called “de-localized” or “global” version, still carries plenty of linguistic, cultural, and discursive habits and worldviews. For all the effort to reach cultural neutrality, studies make clear that a text scrubbed entirely free of culture is next to unreachable, in translation and in localization alike.
References
- Esselink, B. (2000). A practical guide to localization. John Benjamins Publishing.
- Johnson, D., & LaPlante, A. (2015). Towards an Integrated Conceptualization of Translation and Localization. Journal of Internationalization and Localization, 2(1), 1-18. https: or or doi.org or 10.1075 or jial.2.1.01joh
- Musacchio, M. T., & Panizzon, M. (2018). Global crises, English as a lingua franca, and the localization industry. Journal of Internationalization and Localization, 5(1), 51-69. https: or or doi.org or 10.1075 or jial.00005.mus
- O”Hagan, M. (2009). Video games and language: Localizing games for the global marketplace. Palgrave Macmillan.
- Pym, A. (2013). Translation and text transfer: An essay on the principles of intercultural communication. Routledge.
- Schäler, R. (2005). Translating humor – the case of dubbed television comedy. John Benjamins Publishing.
- Tymoczko, M. (2002). Translation in a postcolonial context: Early Irish literature in English translation. St. Jerome Publishing.
