Localization

The digital revolution led to the emergence of a large number of novel digital genres, such as software programs, websites of all kinds, video games, mobile apps or intelligent assistants. These novel texts led to the development of “localization” processes, mainly due differences in how they were developed, produced, stored, distributed and used, as well as differences in how they were translated. Localization is now a complex technological, textual, communicative and cognitive process by which these digital interactive texts are processed in order to be used in linguistic and socio-cultural contexts other than those of production (Jiménez-Crespo 2008: 40, 2013). Localization involves a specific comprehensive interprofessional cycle in which translators, localization engineers, programmers or project managers collaborate flexibly depending on the type and scale of the project (Pym 2011: 410; Jiménez-Crespo 2013). It is a highly profitable consolidated area within the language industry, as well as one of its main growth engines where the "digital technologies and processes" industry amounts to over 30 billion dollars yearly (GALA 2016). This chapter reviews the origins of localization process and the "localization industry", as well as how they have contributed new concepts and paradigms to Translation Studies, such as the notion of GILT or digital accessibility. It then reviews its different subareas areas depending on the digital platform (e.g., computer, tablet, console, WWW) and its continuous expansion with new emerging digital genres (Santini et al 2011). It is followed by a critical analysis of its gradual reception within Translation Studies, the evolution of its definitions and theoretical models, as well as the research areas with the highest volume of research. It then analyses the introduction of the theoretical paradigm of "localization" applied to other sub-disciplines such as journalistic or advertising translation.  The chapter then offers a critical review of the main research directions, such as applied studies on didactics or quality, as well as descriptive corpus studies. It ends with an overview of developing approaches, as well as localization as a key process in the ever-growing digital transformation, including areas such as localization crowdsourcing online or the application of post-editing machine translation in this area.