ABSTRACT
Desktop computers were introduced in the 1980s and during that decade hardware manufacturers and software publishers realized that in order to sell their products in other markets or countries, they would need to adapt them so that they would still be functional in different environments. This adaptation became known as localization since target countries or groups of countries were also referred to as locales. Localization was required because computers at the time relied on very different character sets so a program written in, say, Spanish and encoded in a Western encoding would not run properly on a Japanese operating system. Since then, localization processes have become more sophisticated and are often coupled with internationalization processes, which aim at preparing a product for localization. Note that, because of the length of the words internationalization and localization, the words are commonly shortened to i18n and l10n. These acronyms are ‘quoting the first and last letter of each word, and replacing the run of intermediate letters by a number merely telling how many such letters there are.’1Adapting a product to a specific market or locale is of course not specific to the Information Technology (IT) industry, as any business hoping to operate successfully on a global scale is likely to rely on transformation processes so that their equipment, medicines or food products meet, or even exceed local regulations, customs and expectations. In this book, however, the focus is on software applications, which are also referred to as applications or apps.
