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Language, Power, and Software 285

necessarily in languages other than English. As an industry, the local-
ization industry is highly diverse and not geographically concentrated.
Other than the localization divisions of major software firms,
there are literally hundreds of firms, scattered throughout the world
depending on the linguistic area, which “specialize” in localization,
often on subcontract from major software producers. Indeed, the
software giants of the US often turn to small partners abroad to lo-
calize, or to test localized versions of, their major packages. To my
knowledge there is no study of the history and organization of the lo-
calization industry.
Localization is ordinarily seen as primarily a technical task. The
localizer must not only be an experienced code writer, but must have
a thorough knowledge of two languages, and ideally, of two cultures.
Even localization from one North European language to another
(e.g., from English to Spanish) requires good coding ability together
with a knowledge of the subtleties of both languages.
“Localization” is intimately linked to another issue, commonly
termed “standardization of code.” To understand the importance of
standardization requires analyzing how computers interpret let-
ters—the letters, say, of standard English. Since computers can
deal only with digital numbers, American computer coders decided
early on that the letters of the English language (along with num-
bers, punctuation marks, etc.) would be mapped onto an eight-bit
grid (which contained 256 theoretical possibilities). The standard
known as ASCII (American Standard Code for the Interpretation of
Information) assigns to each letter, number, and punctuation mark
a specific numbered place among the 256 possible places. Thus, for
example, the letter “lower case a” might be assigned location num-
ber 27, “lower case b,” 28, etc. Computers (which communicate only
in binary numbers) have established a convention that each 8-bit
word (“byte”) at some point contains an alphanumerical symbol.
The decoding software “reads” from a positive sign in location 27 in
a 8-bit “table” the letter “c,” for example, location 27 representing
the letter “c,” which is then placed as a “c” on the screen, stored as
a character, added it to another word, printed as a “c,” etc. Com-
munication between two computers is possible when they all use
the same standardized code, such as ASCII. ASCII emerged to
solve the problem of lack of standardization. In an earlier period,
each software manufacturer devised his or her own proprietary
system for alphanumeric coding. Thus, one system’s “a” may have
been location 27, while another’s was location 203. Cross-platform