As witnessed on almost every news channel today, the military’s mission objectives can shift radically from warfighting to civil support. This community has a lot of really great examples of practical localization and globalization opportunities. In the classic military environment, everyone speaks English, understands the common military phonetic alphabet, and has their clocks set to Greenwich Mean Time (e.g. Zulu) using military time. Twenty years ago those assumptions general held up, although today, they cannot rely on any of these assumptions any longer.
Today, commanders in the field have to be able to more quickly adapt their available assets to peace-driven, civil support and security objectives. In these roles, field commanders often support non-military domestic and international civil authorities. Now, military units have to speak in local terms to include time format, time zone, language, grammar, measurement conversion, currency, telephony requirements, and more. While this paradigm is not a new one, there architectures generally do not support these changes and present difficult problems for field users who have to toggle back-and-forth between the two.
Consider something as simple as a keyboard. In a multi-national environment how would foreign nationals interact with our keyboards? Internationally, keyboard layouts vary widely. From a technological stand-point, advances in keyboards (Ex. LCD keyboards) will offer cost-effective solutions. While not currently available to the public, this type of technology offers a lot of solutions from a human factors stand-point, but specifically helps address multi-cultural, regional, and language challenges faced in the field.
Issues such as these require consideration early in development and engineering processes. We are not proposing that all applications need to support every language, local, and/or culture right out of the box. However, the geopolitical and military support climates today; and for the foreseeable future; suggest that future capabilities need to be malleable enough so that we can localize/globalize them as needed.
For developers and engineers, localizing a system is the process of extracting all the language-dependent content that are normally contained within compiled applications, and putting them in a separate location that can later be modified by a translator and system administrators. By itself, this type of change does not cost anything and is really a matter of discipline within the engineering process. However, if this type of issue is not identified early the cost to go back and make these types of changes can be quite high.
Tags: globalization