The languages of customers form a moving target. Exporters have developed pretty good ideas of the ever-finer granularity of their end-user base, even though we still think basically in terms of a few dozen 'national’ languages and cultures as our technical horizon in the localization industry. Yet if we believe in this evolving trend to greater personalization of products and services, we will fairly soon find ourselves asked by clients to address such issues as local dialects and age-group idiolects when localizing to infra-national segments. The question now becomes - How local can you get?

One on one localization may be a far off dream - or nightmare - but as John Freivalds shows in his brief yet invigorating history of localizing software to the Baltic language region, local customers only a million or so strong can be tenacious in their demand for culturally and linguistically adapted products from global producers. For manufacturers and publishers, small-volume markets naturally pose a problem of cost-effectiveness, yet there is growing evidence that own-language versions are always the ultimate preference when it comes to consuming content on the web, in a game or at the movies. Not so long ago, the half a million or so population of Iceland successfully campaigned for a localized version of a major software program in a ‘small’ market that had previously been judged unprofitable by the publisher. Caveat vendor!

The good news is that this ever finer-tuning of their products and services to ever more local markets is set to become easier for purchasers of localization servers, provided that they understand the underlying processes at stake. The key word here is content, and as Vignette’s Deborah Webb explains in her thoughtfully explained article on content globalization, articulating a globalization strategy rooted in a solid content management model will offer a enabling foundation for enterprises grappling with the growing complexity of their processes and needs. And once the enterprise can manage its content efficiently, it will then be able to leverage its assets across a far greater range of languages, sub-languages, dialects and what have you, than using a localization strategy based on just scattered ‘documents’.

Where does the actual localization vendor come into this rosy picture of ever differentiated offerings to ever more finely-segmented targets? Well, hold on tight! If we are to believe industry thought leader Jaap van der Meer, our current supply model, whereby a few large global vendors imperiously share out enterprise localization jobs to a much larger group of single language vendors, offering highly expensive global language coverage for that critical corporate content, has had its day. The technology – and growing pressure from costs - is on hand to wipe away a decade of competitive consolidation in the localization industry, replacing it with an innovative model of collaborative marketplacing. This will put open-system-driven automation at the heart of the multilingual content localization process, radically cutting costs by opening up production opportunities to a swathe of smaller players abler to operate more nimbly over the web. Don’t forget, you first read it here!