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286 Kenneth Keniston

intelligibility was impossible; each proprietary system required
mastery of its own internal code; communication between two com-
puters using different codes was impossible (or required complex
transliteration programs). To solve this Tower of Babel problem,
ASCII was developed and little by little imposed by its success on
virtually all American software writers, and then, with modifica-
tions, on other languages whose characters could be adapted to the
eight-bit ASCII system. With modifications, ASCII, or a compara-
ble eight-bit (one byte) system, has proved adaptable to most lan-
guages except the ideographic languages like Chinese, which
require tens of thousands of characters. For them, two-byte codes
2
are necessary, involving 256 (65,536) possibilities. The emerging
standard called Unicode, which aims at including all human lan-
guages, is a two-byte system.
But localization—whether it occurs, how it occurs, and how well
and deeply it is done—is also an area where technology meets poli-
tics and culture in ways that I will emphasize in this paper. Else-
where I have pointed to the ways that implicitly embedded cultural
assumptions of the original language (almost always English) may
(even in well-localized software) be perceived as alien, hostile, or un-
intelligible to users in another culture (Keniston 1997). Here I will
focus on the prior question of whether or not localized software ex-
ists at all.
Localization, or more generally language, has rarely been
treated as an important topic in the literature on the impacts of the
so-called Computer Age. But both individuals and governments have
been acutely aware of this problem. The Indian high school student
in Delhi with a perfect knowledge of Hindi but a less than perfect
knowledge of English confronts the issue of localization daily when
he struggles with the “help” menus of his Windows 98 operating
system—in English. The government of the tiny island republic of
Iceland (population 500,000) confronts the issue of localization di-
rectly when it pleads with Microsoft to develop an Icelandic version
of Microsoft’s operating systems on the grounds that in its absence,
young Icelanders are losing fluency in their traditional language. Of
all nations, France has been perhaps the most vigorous in insisting
on localization. A former French foreign minister termed the effort to
preserve the hegemony of French against English “a worldwide
struggle,” “which we, the French, are the first to appreciate.” Allying
themselves with French-speaking Canadians and French speakers
in so-called “Francophonic Africa,” the French have made systematic
efforts to suppress the use of English and insist on French. Software