Going Global

In an increasing web unifed world, globalisation & localisation are the two strong ingredients for successful e-business. Unlike a local store, your customer & competitors are not local & nearby. When the web libralised marketing to global customers, it also libralised the competition from local to global. Successful e-businesses are those who follow a strong globalised localisation or localised globalisation strategy.

IBM's Newsletter carries an article which precisely talks about this. In the article, IBM put forward 3 important steps which includes, Internationalisation, Localisation and Globalisation. Excerpts from the article

I18N - Internationalization
The design and development of an application so it can easily be modified to support different languages and cultural conventions. This involves isolating text strings so they can be replaced with translated strings and ensuring that the application can handle text strings of any length. Culture-specific settings, such as data formats and collation sequences, need to be external from the application and selected based on user preferences.

L10N - Localization
The process of translating the text strings, creating culture-specific settings, and packaging the application into a translated language version. Localization assumes that there can be multiple versions of the same application, one for each language. Today's Internet-based applications can be accessed from anywhere in the world -- by users with different backgrounds and languages -– so the application must be able to support multiple languages and cultural conventions simultaneously.

G11N - Globalization
The proper design and execution of systems, software, services, and procedures so one instance of software, executing on a single server or end-user machine, can process multilingual data and present culturally correct information, such as collation, date and number formats. Designing a globally-enabled application goes beyond internationalization and localization.

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