Orlando Day -1 (sunday)

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Well I have made it through the first day here at Tech-Ed 2005. Sunday was when all the Pre-Conference tutorial were given and Houman Pournasseh and Russ Rolfe gave a 5 hour overview on Developing International Software. One of the good questions that came out of that session was "So what does Microsoft mean when it uses the words "globalization", "localization" and "internationalization".

The answer given was the following graphic plus these definitions:

                                 Internationalization
|
|
-------------------------------------------------
| | |
World-Readiness Localization Market
| Customization
|
----------------------------------
| | |
Globalization Localizability Customizability

 

Internationalization: The process of creating a product that is world-ready and customized for a given language and regional market. 

World-Readiness: A product that is properly globalized, simple to customize and easily localizable.

Globalization: Designing software for the input, display, and output of a defined set of Unicode supported language, scripts and data relating to specific locales and cultures.

Localizability: Designing software code and resources such that resources can be localized with no changes to the source code.

Customizability: Designing software that is componentized and extensible to allow for replacement, addition and/or subtraction of features necessary for a given market.

Localization: The process of customizing or translating the separated data and resources needed for a specific language-locale pair.

Market Customization: Tailoring a products functionality to meet the needs of a given regional market.

This I know is very generalized and I will see what I can do to add more clearificaiton on www.microsoft.com/globaldev when I get back from Tech-ed.