Glossary

Like other industries, localization has its lingo. And, sometimes it gets confusing! The following should help increase your localization savvy.

Abbreviation for "bi-directional", a term used to describe scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew that generally run from right to left, except for numbers, which run from left to right.

Abbreviation for “double byte character sets”, a term used to describe Far Eastern scripts such as Japanese and Chinese that require twice the space of English for each letter.

(1) The time gap between the appearance of a product in its lead market and of localized versions. This should be kept as small as possible to avoid revenue loss. (2) The portion of a file that changes between two versions.

Acronym for desktop publishing, a term used to describe all layout design required following translation to ensure layout consistency across all languages.

The sale and purchase of goods and services via the Internet. In contrast to e-commerce, e-business is used to describe business-to-business (b2b) transactions.

The sale and purchase of goods and services via the Internet. In contrast to e-business, e-commerce is used to describe business-to-consumer (b2c) transactions.

A term used to denote a) instant “for your information” machine translation and b) monolingual text summarization.

(1) The general process of worldwide economic, political, technological and social integration; (2) The process of making all the necessary technical, financial, managerial, personnel, marketing, and other enterprise decisions necessary to facilitate localization.

A translation tool designed to facilitate localization of websites with constantly-changing content.

The process of ensuring at a technical/design level that a product can be easily localized.

An application that is already in existence and that needs to be incorporated into or ported to a new environment.

The process of modifying products or services to account for linguistic and/or cultural differences in distinct markets.

A translation productivity tool that works by breaking down sentences or other text segments, analyzing them in context and then recreating their meaning in the target language. Machine translation works best on large volumes of well-written texts from narrow subject areas.

An abbreviation for “multi-language vendor”, a term used to describe a relatively large localization service provider offering a wide range of languages and other services.

An abbreviation for “simultaneous shipment”. This refers to the common practice in the localization industry of releasing multiple language versions of a product together, on or around the date on which the original is released. Simship is necessary because a substantial proportion of product revenue is generated in the weeks following release, and customers stop buying localized version of previous releases when the new original appears.

An abbreviation for “single language vendor”, a term used to describe a relatively small localization service provider offering only one or a restricted number of languages.

A database of specialist words for a subject area or areas used to facilitate management system high quality human or computer-aided translation.

A translation productivity tool comprising a database containing segments of source and target language texts that have been aligned to match each other. Translation memories are used to retrieve previously translated material, e.g., when handling new versions of existing documents.