A translation-oriented analysis on localization style guides

Abstract

As one of the most important requirements of globalization and technological advances, localization means adapting a software or product to be used in different target markets with different locales. The most important aspect of this adaptation is translation activity. Ensuring certain standards and complying with company guidelines in translation of texts presented to the target audience is very important in terms of optimizing the local user experience. Companies that wish their product to enter many local markets simultaneously and to gain success quickly, work with localization teams consisting of many translators. Localization style guides are prepared and delivered to teams for quickly transferring information such as marketing strategy, communication approach and language registers. Adhering to style guides, translators can quickly translate, and quality of the target texts can easily be assured by the managers. There may be differences in contents of style guides depending on the requirements. However, the guides generally consist of formatting rules, brief information about the company or brand's products, writing principles specific to the target locale, language register suitable for target audience, and glossaries prepared for term standardization. Style guides, which are prepared at different detail levels for various localization projects, can be open-access or restricted due to company policies. In addition, depending on the nature of a localization project, general or language-specific style guides can also be prepared. In this study, first of all, localization-oriented style guides will be evaluated in the context of classification, then a general template will be tried to be revealed by examining the contents of these guides. Finally, with the aim of evaluating the adequacy and limitations of language-specific style guides, the contents of two guides prepared for Turkish will be discussed, and the relation between localization targets and style guides will be evaluated in the light of the relevant analyses.