If you look hard, something of localization can be found in the contexts where translations have long been carried out. Here we have little interest in restricting localization only to the realm of the electronic or the postmodern. The foreign news we read in the local press can legitimately be seen as a localization of foreign-language texts, at some point transformed by the international agencies, and transformed in ways that go beyond endemic notions of translation. We might see the joke we tell as a localization of the joke previously heard, or Joyce's Ulysses as localizing Homer's Odyssey, or indeed most texts can be seen as whole or partial rewrites and thus recall some sense of localization. In all these processes, binary confrontations of languages or cultures are only a part of what is going on; something more than translation is at stake. Localizations, in this very general sense, are indeed all around us. Their practices have a certain logic, a long history, and a future effect on the configuration of our cultures. One just needs a particular eye to see them.
If localizations are all around us, it is because texts are always in movement around us. By this we mean that texts are material objects that are constantly being distributed in time and space, just as material subjects (people) are. As this chapter should show, the principle of dynamic distribution is essential to our view of both localization and translation.
Here we have in mind a very material kind of distribution, a set of real movements through time and space. This active mode of distribution, based on sets of movements, is not always seen. Its basis in material things might even be denied. Some say, for instance, that if a piece of English-language software is localized in Spanish, there has certainly been contact between the worlds of English and Spanish, but the actual English-language software has not really
moved. It is still there, operating in the English-language cultural system. It might have gained some prestige or have been revised thanks to the localization into Spanish, but it appears not to have undergone any displacement itself; instead of active distribution we only see passive reproduction or adaptation. As in traditional translation theory, the source stays still while the translation acts as a mere token representing it. That view is commonsensical and entirely valid, as far as it goes. Unfortunately it relies on an excessively idealist notion of cultural systems (such as languages, literatures, or even software markets). On that view, the source and target systems are structured in terms of simple presence and absence. Once a text is in the system, it magically stays there for a long time so that its presence affects all other texts in the system (that, at least, is how systems are classically defined). The concept is well suited to Saussurean natural-language systems, to literary canons, and indeed to translation in its more representative modes, but it does not quite fit in with the rapid product cycles that concern the localization industry, publishing houses, or indeed anyone actively engaged in the marketing of cultural products. A localized text is not called on to represent any previous text; it is instead part of one and the same process of constant material distribution, which starts in one culture and may continue in many others. This is where translation theory has to learn to think differently.
Rather than jumping between stable systems of mutual difference, distribution is for us more like a massive firework display at night, where texts reach a fleeting form in geography and history, then fade away. As most computer users know, software is not universally available throughout a language space like English; it is used in many specialist niches beyond that language space, and it is fast superseded. Effort is constantly needed to establish and maintain distribution even within the home market (if indeed that term has any sense), which may be configured in terms of any number of minor locales. That effort produces countless acts of minor distribution, testing new locales, expanding old ones, constantly keeping texts in movement, like the burning gunpowder that keeps the fireworks visible in the sky. That effort can take forms like publicity, physical distribution chains, updating, and adaptation to locales within the source-language world. All those acts establish and maintain a distribution pattern within a certain piece of time and space. When those things are not done, distribution with diminish, the constitutive movements will be shorter and weaker, and the text will eventually be without function. Of course, to extend that distribution across a barrier of language and culture, one has to invest further effort (more gunpowder), including effort of a slightly different kind, in order to obtain distribution of a slightly different kind. But the general principle of material distribution surely remains the same, both before and after the barrier is crossed. Both before and after the jump, people work so that the distribution of texts can be maintained, extended, or possibly diminished. This, we suggest, is a general notion that can be applied to texts of all kinds. A few examples might help illustrate the principle.
Holed up in a cheap hotel in Madrid, little to read save a newspaper from the flight, we allowed our insomniac eyes to stray across Le Monde. Such might be reception in a place smaller than the lands of language systems. All we had was an aptitude for the reception of text. What did we read from the French world that night? Was it a linguist's curiosity that was drawn to the advertisement in Figure 3? Or a certain concern with foreign affairs, since the first Gulf War was just over? Whatever the case, the mind lingered on an advertisement in which the State of Kuwait announced “prequalification of international contractors to participate in tenders”. Fascinating stuff. Of course, this particular reader was not an international contractor (we were in a cheap hotel, killing time); there was no question of putting in a tender anywhere. What we are calling distribution, even at this most unexceptional level, had brought the text somehow beyond the bounds of its rightful scope of action. The language was still quite meaningful, indeed of particular interest.
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