What is Localization?

Localization is the process of converting media products to a form where they are both linguistically and culturally acceptable in countries outside the original target market.

"Media products" take a variety of forms, including software, help, printed documentation, online documentation, multimedia (audio, video, and music) etc. An important factor people have to consider is that something, like language, humor, jargon, colloquialisms, slang, gestures, images, people, sounds, fashions, religions, values, symbols, animals, histories, education, laws, color sense and sensitivity, political correctness, etiquette, etc. might vary dramatically among countries and cultures. To localize products effectively, it is essential that software developers provide a framework in which the localization can take place while the product is still in the development phase. This framework is called "internationalization".

What is DBCS?

East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are classified as double-byte character sets (DBCS), which means two bytes are used to represent a single character as opposed to one byte for Western European languages. Although Roman characters can be easily represented in 128 characters by using 7 bit ASCII, East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean require 16 bits to represent roughly 32,000 double-byte characters.