• Sidebar: Degrees of Localization

The Local Language Program, introduced in Mar. 2004, will ease the task of making Windows and Office available in additional languages and encourages local communities to be involved in creating customized versions for their language. The program will make Microsoft software available to many million new potential customers, help Microsoft compete with open-source efforts to make software available in more languages, and separates commercial from cultural incentives when determining which languages Office or Windows should be customized for.

The Push to Localize

To meet the needs of its worldwide customer base, Microsoft releases its software products in multiple languages: for example, Windows 2000 and Windows XP were released in about 25 fully localized language versions. (For a description of various types of localization, see the sidebar "Degrees of Localization".) Recent versions of Windows, and certain versions of Office, can also be significantly localized with the addition of a Multilingual User Interface (MUI) Pack.

The decision to localize a product for a particular language is typically a commercial and business decision: Microsoft must see sufficient demand for its products in a particular language to justify the expense of localization, and it must have sales and marketing resources available in that language region to sell and support the product.

Because of these limits, Microsoft’s localization efforts, though reasonably extensive, leave most of the world’s 6,000 languages and 5,000 dialects unserved by Microsoft products. Some of these languages are spoken by hundreds of millions of people, while others are critical to a nation’s identity. Amharic is the main language of 60 million Ethiopians, for example, but because of the relatively low penetration of PCs in Ethiopia, neither Windows nor Office has been localized in that language and no MUI Pack is available for it. At the other end of the scale, only 28,000 Canadians speak Inuktitut—a number too small to convince Microsoft to create an Inuktitut version of its products—but the language remains important to native Canadians for cultural reasons.

As a result, local governments and educational institutes interested in bringing the educational and communications benefits of modern computing to poorer people or small linguistic communities often find that no software is available in the desired language. The Local Language Program gives local governments and education institutions the ability to proactively adapt Microsoft products to their languages will improve Microsoft’s sales prospects and image in many parts of the world that are only now beginning to adopt computer technology.

The complexities of translating products and building and testing localized versions also put Microsoft at a disadvantage when compared with open-source products. Because the source code for open-source products can be easily obtained, dedicated individuals in a given linguistic group can translate language strings and user interface elements into the local language with little outside support. For example, a team of 10 people, supported by Slovenian government and education officials, were able to create a Slovenian version of the open-source application suite OpenOffice, a Microsoft Office competitor, in about one year. Microsoft also offers Windows and Office in Slovenian, but the government supported the open-source translation effort to give Slovenians an alternative to the Microsoft products.

Language Interface Packs

Recognizing the need to make some form of localization easier, Microsoft put technology into Windows XP and Office 2003 to help developers build localized versions of those products. Now, the company has introduced a Local Language Program (LLP) to encourage communities to use this technology to build Language Interface Packs (LIPs), which are essentially "skins" of each product's user interface translated into the local language.

Unlike localization projects, which are done by Microsoft itself or by commercial localization vendors in various countries, local people can themselves do much of the work in creating a LIP for a particular language. The decision to create a LIP can thus be driven by cultural or political concerns, with less regard to whether the effort will pay its way in a commercial sense. Microsoft expects that the LLP will double the number of languages in which Office and Windows are currently available, from about 40 to 80, within a 12-month period.

The creation of a LIP begins with developing a glossary based on about 3,000 terms and phrases (supplied by Microsoft) found in the Windows and Office interfaces. Using volunteers, academics, government officials, and any other interested parties, communities create a parallel list of local language equivalents for each term or phrase. In many cases, a language has no equivalent term and the community works together to come up with a new term that is incorporated into the glossary. The glossary is locked down when the community considers it complete, after which it forms a single, public-domain standard to which Microsoft and other software vendors can conform.

Microsoft uses the completed glossary to convert language resources in Office and Windows and then builds and tests the resulting LIP, a process that takes about 3 months. The completed LIP is made available to the community for free download and can be applied as a "skin" to a specific Office or Windows version. In most cases, the community will add the LIP to a related localized version so that resources such as help files can be accessible in a secondary language. For example, the Catalan language is spoken by about 5 million people in northeast Spain, Andorra, and parts of France and Italy. The Catalan LIP can be applied as a skin to a Spanish or other localized version of Office 2003 or Windows.

Availability and Resources

Because LIPs require Unicode double-byte language support, they work only on more recent Microsoft products, such as Windows XP and Office 2003 Standard Edition. This may limit LIP penetration in areas of the world that do not have the resources to acquire recent models of computers or to pay for Windows XP and Office 2003. Nevertheless they fill an important gap in Microsoft’s international coverage and will help the company bolster its position with numerous national governments that have been promoting open-source alternatives, which are available in a wide range of languages and for which local versions can be created locally.

Microsoft has also moved to license Windows and Office at very low cost to citizens in certain countries, such as Thailand and Malaysia. This removes some of the financial obstacles to wider adoption of localized Microsoft products.

Other recent local language initiatives were described in "Local Language Initiatives" on page 19 of the Jan. 2004 Update.

Features of the Local Language Program were developed partly by Project Bhasha, a program designed to speed up localization efforts in India. The Web site for Project Bhasha is bhashaindia.com.

Local organizations interested in developing LIPs should contact their local Microsoft Office. A list of offices can be found at www.microsoft.com/worldwide.