It’s an unfortunate fact that many people have false ideas about language. For example, hearing a non-standard dialect of English—such as African American Vernacular English or Appalachian English—might cause someone to think the speaker to be not well-educated, when in actuality, linguistic choices don’t necessarily reflect the intelligence of the speaker. A separate “dialect,” also called a “variety,” of a language can create cohesiveness in a smaller group among speakers and allow members to feel more at ease.

A so-called “language” tends to be the “ideal” way to talk by the most powerful group among a larger whole, whether in one country, several countries, etc. For example, when our colleague, Olivia, studied Japanese in college, she was taught the Tokyo dialect, because that’s where the current capital of Japan is, as well as its center of its business and trade. When she lived in a homestay in Nagoya, a major city to the west of Tokyo, she was surprised when some people would conjugate verbs differently or use sentence endings she’d never heard of.

An “accent” can sometimes be used interchangeably with “dialect/variety”; however, this isn’t quite the case. “Accent” refers to how a person pronounces words (think a New Yorker saying “I’m walkin’ here!”), while “dialect” or “variety” refers not just to pronunciation, but also grammar and vocabulary (like “I gone down to the meeting, but wasn’t nobody there” or “bald” for a treeless mountain in Appalachian English).

In the article mentioned above, the individual said he spoke “pidgin” English. A “pidgin” is a form of language that arises when two or more groups who do not have a language in common must speak together, and create simplified, rather limited vocabulary and grammar structures. Linguists tend to consider pidgins as incomplete languages, as they do not generally have a fully structured grammar. A pidgin may form into a “creole” when fully developed vocabulary and grammar develop from children who learn to use the pidgin as their native language. An example of a pidgin sentence is: “Dem neva cam?” for “They haven’t come yet?”

The world of linguistics goes even farther and deeper than just these examples, and are just some of the things we need to think about as language service providers. An interpreter might need to study up on a dialect before helping a client, or a separate person might need to be found altogether if the interpreter knows nothing of the specific language variety.

As a language service provider, we think of these different scenarios, cases, and variations all the time. It’s our responsibility to provide our clients with quality service, and getting to the heart of linguistic differences is just one aspect of that.

First, let us define what localization is. Broadly, localization is taking one material and transforming it into something that is understandable and relatable in a different culture or region. This means that localization is all about adaptation. When localizing something, you will be looking out for concepts, symbols, and words that would not fit into the target culture or region. This means adapting the original product into something that looks as if it was not created in a different country entirely.

For example, this can be something as simple as general design. When looking at an ad or commercial, for it to be successfully localized, you will have to make sure that the info displayed (i.e. numbers, date, time, etc.) are all changed into the appropriate format. If you kept the dollar sign when changing an advertisement for your product for an audience that does not use USD, they would be confused about how much the product actually costs and if it is even sold in the country that they’re in.

Internationalization is different than localization in that it focuses more on trying to universalize settings. Internationalization can be thought of as a typically more “under the hood” kind of process, where you will focus more on the coding side of things. This means focusing on hard-coded strings, concatenation, and finding out what is supported in Non-English input and output. If this is not taken into account, anything that is displayed is at risk to not display correctly. Internationalization is therefore more of a system focused on making sure that the software itself has no problem being used in different languages and thus focuses a lot less on linguistic errors like localization is.

There are more subtle nuances between internationalization, but it will be easy to remember the overarching difference between the two if you just remember that localization focuses more on the linguistic aspects of things while internationalization focuses more on the software that the localization will use to display or function.