Casting Voices

When it comes to working with different languages for projects, you'll need to have a clear definition of what these terms mean, particularly if you are the project manager.

Globalization

Globalization is understanding cultural differences and customizing both the content, written and verbal speech requirements relative to each specific location.

Essentially, you're reaching your entire customer base, addressing them with words and concepts that they understand, customized to satisfy the communication requirements of each culture and respective location.

Although this sounds complicated, it gets more so when dialects are involved.

For example, you are preparing an eLearning presentation for French speakers in Quebec, Canada. In order to best accommodate your audience, you would need the literature or voice-over to be presented in the French Canadian dialect, not in the traditional Parisian Frenh of continental Europe.

You would have to take the subtleties of a language into account, for example, using the informal or formal form of the verb etre (to be), either tu or vous, depending on the established relationship with the audience.

The same issue could crop up if you need Spanish localized. Which Spanish would you need? If you are preparing a presentation for Spanish speaking audiences native to Spain, you would need to present them with learning tools in their native Castilian Spanish dialect. If you were entertaining Spanish speakers in Mexico, their Spanish would differ significantly from that of Spain, and accordingly, so would Latin American Spanish from either of the other Spanish dialects mentioned above.

Localization

Localization is the modification of services or products to the cultural, linguistic, legal, and technical requirements of a specific location. Basically, each product or service is programmed to serve a specific community according to their language, resources, and culture.

Localization is a painstaking endeavor, often outsourced to professionals who are already familiar with the conditions that localization presents.

Wikipedia defines the localization aspect of translation this way:

Often, localization is the adaptation of an object to a locality. An example is in software localization, where the messages which a program presents to a user need to be translated into various languages.

Next week, we'll discuss the sheer number of languages and dialects spoken throughout the world.

Cheers,