Localization (here including translation) can be seen as a series of responses to things that have been distributed or are to be distributed. In other words, in both loose practice and the theory we are interested in here, localization and translation depend on distribution (and on several hundred other things as well). Let us investigate a few possible objections to this innocuous proposition.
One might complain that since no text need actually be moved in order to be transformed, transformations can take place independently of distribution. Yes, that is possible. However, insistence on one-to-one solidarity (demanding one act of distribution for each act of localization) has little to do with what we should now qualify as a general dependence on distribution. Just as no person is an island and no culture is entirely isolated, no linguistic worker ever operates entirely alone or in a strictly one-off situation. Even when localizers are not aware of responding to any particular distribution, they will necessarily be using linguistic and cultural knowledge accrued from previous localizations, depending on previous distributions, which are themselves responses to previous localizations, and so on in a series of links that unavoidably chain the particular to the general.
Skeptical minds might then interpret the connection between distribution and localization as a question of chickens and eggs. Yes indeed, the "series of links" idea (the one we have just evoked) does lend itself to thoughts of ungrounded dialectics, of pure difference as being enough to keep things going. Then again, the relation in this case has none of the cyclical causality of genetic or generative metaphors. In its purely epistemic dimension (with respect to the way we know the object, regardless of what that object really is) the dependence of localization on distribution is remarkably one-way. Although localization depends on distribution, distribution does not depend on localization, or at least not in the same manner. After all, if there were no localization, there could still be distribution; but if no text were ever going to move, there would be no reason even to think about localization as a purposeful activity, and probably no reason to conceptualize it at all. Whatever the material circumstances, no matter whether the actual moment of localization is situated before or after the actual movement of a text, the concept of distribution precedes the concept of localization. We offer this as a general principle, with several practical consequences.
Let us suppose that, thanks to this general dependence, localizers commonly have ideas concerning the kind of distribution that has taken place, is to take place or, in a training situation, could take place with respect to the text to be localized. In other words, localizers have ideas about the purposes of distribution, and they use those ideas when localizing. We are working in this way on this particular text because it is going to that person over there and has come from that person back there, and energy is invested in those movements for some kind of reason, hopefully for the sake of enormous quick profits. Of course, it is tempting to imagine that all linguistic workers think that way about every single text they work on. They would ideally ascertain the fundamental purpose of the distributive directionality and then transform texts accordingly. If the distribution is supposed to have such and such an effect, we will work so that our output makes that effect happen. All well and good.
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