Software Localization - some details in terms of how the process work - Part 1

What is software localization ? Localization means releasing software that works in different countries the same way. For a person who is not experienced at this, they would wonder as to how the same software can work in different countries almost identically ? After all, if you look at the test that shows up in a software, the text is different in different languages, and it must be a lot of effort to get this done. Well, it is a lot of effort to get a software that works properly in different countries, but not as high as you might expect. Consider a website that showcases news or has articles (which means the site is almost entirely text based). Such sites would need re-writing the entire content into different languages, and the effort can be considerable, and for sites that depend on getting news out quickly, the amount of time involved can be considerable.
However, if you consider a software, there are 2 main elements. One element is the text that a user views (whether it be text on dialogs, or error messages) - this needs to be different in different languages. On the other hand, a huge amount of the internals of a software is the code, and this code does not need to be translated (which is a huge amount of effort savings), since this code is not visible to the users.
In this post, I will give a very high level summary of how the localization of software can be done, and then break this up in future posts. Inside the software, in any part of the code where there is an output of text that the user can see, there is a special section of code that identifies this is as a UI content. When this is done all over the software, all the text, error messages, information given to users, etc, all of this has a small identifier that marks that this section of code is different.
Next, a script is run that gathers all these sections of code that has an identifier, and presto, you get a large set of phrases. These are then sent off for translation into different languages, and when translated, are put back language by language into the software. So, when a user launches German version of the software, the code pulls out all the German translations, and shows those to the users instead of the English originals. Thus, you find that your software has become localized.
This is a simplified version of the entire process, and I will add more details in future posts.