{"id":288,"date":"2003-12-12T22:00:01","date_gmt":"2003-12-13T03:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2003\/12\/12\/why-localization-and-internationalizat"},"modified":"2006-12-15T23:23:18","modified_gmt":"2006-12-16T04:23:18","slug":"why-localization-and-internationalization-is-important","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2003\/12\/12\/why-localization-and-internationalization-is-important\/","title":{"rendered":"Why localization and internationalization is important"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a233'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/science\/tq\/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2246308\">article<\/a> is mainly covering the Open Source movement and its local heroes.   But this quote really caught my eye:<\/p>\n<p><em><br \/>\n&#x201C;An English-only or even an English-mainly policy necessarily condemns most people, and thus the country as a whole, to a permanent state of mediocrity, since people are unable to be spontaneous, creative and self-confident if they cannot use their first language,&#x201D;<br \/>\n<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Most Americans probably won&#8217;t even think about this at all.  The ones that probably really get it are ones that have spent some time abroad and have to use a computer that has been localized or speak another language at home.   All of a sudden you can&#8217;t read the menus and dialogues and many of the interactions with the computer.  You&#8217;re a little lost in what to do.  Now imagine trying to &#8216;get work&#8217; done in this environment.   This is what many many people deal with when having to deal with a non-localized computer.   On top of dealing with computing for the first time they are forced to use a language they have no internal sense of.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/science\/tq\/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2246308\">Link to story<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This article is mainly covering the Open Source movement and its local heroes. But this quote really caught my eye: &#x201C;An English-only or even an English-mainly policy necessarily condemns most people, and thus the country as a whole, to a permanent state of mediocrity, since people are unable to be spontaneous, creative and self-confident if [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":703,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1215,364,972,260],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gripe","category-japan","category-programming","category-tech"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/703"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}