One of the very valuable lessons that localization can learn from translation theory is to take a long view of history. Thanks to this longer vision, some parts of translation theory are given to debating questions that localization discourse has not yet asked itself. For instance, what is the effect of localization on the dimensions of end-use locales in time and space? Does localization enhance or restrict the diversity of locales? Need we accept a world where localization necessarily profiles people in fixed locales? Does the servicing of immediate needs have priority over long-term learning processes? Does such servicing hamper movements from the peripheries to the centers of knowledge? Is localization bridging gaps or creating divides? Are we creating any kind of cooperation or tolerance? Or does localization promote a world where products arrive in locales but betray no provenance, show no otherness, and ultimately lead to cultural closure?

Such questions assume data on huge swathes of human interaction, over expanses of time and space that are not within the localizers' budgets. They involve issues that no longer concern locales in the strict market-based usages of the term. They address the way people live their lives, moving in and out of specific markets, in the same way as sociolinguistics sees people moving in and out of domains, speaking differently in each but crossing them all to form the networks of social life. In short, we reach a point where we must consider cultures, not locales. We must return to the complex modes of belonging we have described as cultural embedding, and to the myriad diversities that resist localization. Our fundamental questions have to do with cultures in this wider sense, not just as shared points of reference or professional association but as a multiple overlaps of locales, bound together by factors of identity and tongues. 

Our proposition here will be that all forms of cross-cultural mediation should not only promote cooperation (transaction costs and all), but also humanize relations. This is an unfashionable path, running across a minefield full of divergent interpretations of the terms involved. Appeals to a vague common "humanity" have been used to cover over a multitude of exploitative relationships, giving rise to an academic anti-humanism with which we have much sympathy. When we insist, for example, that the stability of equivalence is no more than an operative fiction, or that professionalization is basically a

series of self-defense strategies, our approach might fairly be described as anti-humanist. We are, in those cases, denying any ontology of substance upon which stable human values might be built; we are building on a meme-like world where difference rules and the basic struggle is for survival. And yet now, at this point, we invoke some kind of universal sameness among humans, knowing full well that this too is an operative fiction for which we can offer no substantial ground.

Humanization should refer in some way to "humanism", a term that has meant an enormous number of things to almost as many people (see, for example, Bödeker 1982). It comes to us from the Renaissance, from the Italian cities of the fifteenth century where the studia humanitatis were associated with values like respecting the linguistic integrity of texts, or placing reason above religion. This often meant constructing civil society through secular education and by creating networks between professional intellectuals. In linguistic terms, that kind of humanism placed a high value on the manner of expression, over and above the content of what is expressed. Such were the calls for “eloquence", and the corresponding development of rhetoric as an area of study. Most of us now struggle to appreciate the connection between "eloquence" and "human values, but such things were certainly of a piece in an age just escaping from Christian fundamentalism. Pre-humanists read and translated Plato in terms of how well his pagan ideas fitted in with established doctrine; the humanist Leonardo Bruni read and translated him as a person using stylistic devices, conveying a personality as well as ideas. That might be what is meant by a "humanizing" discourse: Bruni did indeed use philology to put a human face on his texts, including his translations.