By Brigita Pudjodarminto

The GILT-In the Eyes of A Translator

When I entered the freelance translation world in 1994, I did not have any idea about the industry.  The words like globalization, internationalization, localization did not mean anything to me; in fact, I did not get a clearer idea of the whole translation process. Much later on, when I decided to be a freelance translator as part of my entrepreneurship, I then started aware of the mean of the terms “globalization”, “internationalization”, and “localization” and how they are related in the translation industry.

A while ago, I took a free online course on “The Power of Social Media” where I learnt and be familiar with what we have known by the semi-misnomer “localization”, the discourses on the cross-cultural rendering of software and websites now underlie one of the major communication sectors of our time. The term used as “localization” is to refer to a general set of discourses informing cross-cultural text production and adaptation in the fields of software, product documentation, web technology, and some international news services. We find those discourses within what is sometimes also known as the “globalization, internationalization, localization and translation industries” (GILT for short). All these terms are sometimes abbreviated to the first and last letters with a number that indicates how many letters there are in between.

Globalization (G11N)
All the preparations needed in order to enter the international marketplace. Globalization covers anything that must be done differently in any part of the business to optimize international success.

Internationalization (I18N)
It involves creating source material that is locale independent. All language-specific and market-specific content must reside outside the core application. For applications and websites, I18N refers to code changes that are made to ensure that the software/website can be localized and that all information is presented in a format to which the end user is accustomed.

Translation
By translating content, translators adapt meaning from one language into another. This is not a word-for-word, literal process. The translators must comprehend the meaning of the source text and be able to communicate the same meaning using the target language. Translators must always try to keep as close as possible to the original text and style and produce local versions that sound just like the original.

Localization (L10N)
Localization is the process by which a product or service is adapted to a particular country or region. It refers to the adaptation of a product, application or document content to meet the language, cultural and other requirements of a specific target market (a locale). It includes translation but goes beyond it. An example is the use of different units of measurement, currency, date and time, phone numbers or addresses. Localization allows for the correct use of a product/service (such as a software program or a website) while respecting the end user’s cultural habits and expectations.

As a summary, “Localization or GILT” is gone beyond translation to modify the source language and other site elements to appeal to the customer’s cultural preferences in their own target language. Where in the whole process of “localization”, translators play an important role in adapting the meaning from one language to another, they help bridging language barriers in the process of changing an original (source) language version of a content into a different (target) language. As for myself, with a better understanding of this “Localization” process, I believe that it will help broaden my opportunity in expanding my horizon as an English-Indonesian & Javanese translator to enter the localization’s industry.

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