Like many people in our industry, we have to explain localization pretty much every time someone asks what it is we do for a living. We usually say something like this: nearly everyone you know has likely had a chance to laugh over a bad localization, even if these people were unaware that was what they were doing. Localization may be the global community’s most obvious secret. It, or its attempts, are all around us — in our user manuals, on our websites, in our software, on our menus. To call it translation is short-selling it. Translation may be involved, but even a good translation may fail to appeal to you, the end user. This is because cultural norms and assumptions are present in most content people consume.