A lot have been said about internationalization but a lot of people still do not know what these are. I am not an IT expert so I am with those who want to understand what this matter is so I am going to explain it to you without using much technological jargons.
Internationalization is the manner of designing software so that it can be adapted (localized) to different languages and regions effortlessly, cost-effectively, and in particular without engineering changes to the software. Internationalization and localization is interconnected. Meaning, before a program gets localized, it has to be internationalized first.
Localization is a process of familiarize a program for use in a specific locale. From a geographic viewpoint, a locale is a place or political region that shares the same language and customs. From a software viewpoint, it is an identification used to select information correlated with the language or place. This includes the translation of text such as user interface labels, error messages, and online help. It also contains the culture-specific formatting of data items such as monetary values, times, dates, and numbers.
How it Works
Imagine yourself in a foreign country where you do not know the language being spoken there. You went to that country because you are tasked to sell something and you have a quota to make. You are a non-speaker of the language but you brought with you a translator. You will definitely go home selling the quota given to you but you can earn more than that if you yourself learned how to speak their language. Internationalization works like that.
The benefit from localization is access to more markets. Most software companies want to sell their software in every country in the world. Since users prefer to use software in their native tongue, it builds good marketing strategy to develop software that can administer in those languages. However, it is not exactly an international market strategy. International market strategy deals with the planning and vision as to how to market goods/services across national boundaries. This includes dealing with trade restraints, pricing issues (including transport costs and tariffs), etc.
Internationalization deals with the specific details involved in marketing the goods/services in the foreign market. Will this help in boosting the sales? I believe so. Adopting internationalization will definitely benefit the sales but it does not necessarily mean that the ratio of cost and benefit are equal. One has to weigh in the cost vs. benefit ratio before deciding on fully adopting it.
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