An integrated software environment for localization

• Authors: S. P. Mudur;Rekha Sharma;Keyur Shroff;Parvati Rajan
• Venue: ICCC '02 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Computer communication
• Year: 2002

While the information revolution is surely and certainly having a profound impact on the developed world, developing nations are yet to explore these new digital opportunities presented by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to foster rapid growth and benefit the poor. Without urgent and satisfactory localization of digital systems, it is difficult to envisage any significant impact of ICT in less literate nations such as India, where over 92% of the population cannot communicate in English or in any of the other human languages supported today in these new innovation products. A major factor impeding localization is the less known fact that much like software development, localization is a very human intensive task covering the entire life-cycle of a digital system - from conception to retirement. The primary contribution of this research is the design of an integrated environment that will help ease this problem to a reasonable extent. This paper first presents the localization problem showing why it is human effort intensive. The localization process is then sketched. This is followed by a description of the integrated localization environment, including tools and activities covering the localized product life cycle. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such attempt. The paper concludes describing the efforts in progress towards the creation of such an environment within the Linux platform, including a brief description of sample tools developed by the authors as part of this development - OS level support for enabling Indic scripts and an electronic glossary of GUI terms that can assist in the automation of localization.