Localisation 10 August 2026
The Birth of the Localisation Industry: A Short History from the 1980s to Today
Localisation has four decades of history behind it. From the first software projects to the arcades, from the centres in Ireland to the cloud era, we set out how the industry was built and where it stands today.
Localisation is today one of the biggest engines of growth in the language industry. Forty years ago, however, no such job description existed. The industry emerged in order to solve a particular technical problem, and the traces of that problem are still visible in today’s workflows.
Contents
The birth of the localisation industry goes back to the United States of the 1980s, the decade in which the personal computer and commercial software spread. The international growth of companies such as Microsoft, Adobe and Oracle made it necessary to adapt their products to other markets (Jiménez-Crespo 2024, p. 14).
This article looks at how the industry was established, which languages it began with, where it concentrated geographically and how the web and mobile waves transformed it. Knowing the history is not a matter of idle curiosity; it explains why today’s pricing and process structures take the shape they do.
Why does the birth of the localisation industry fall in the 1980s?
The translation process built for print publishing is known in the industry as TEP: translate, edit, publish. This three-step flow worked for books, reports and brochures. In digital products, however, the way things were produced, developed and used was different, and the same flow could not be applied (Jiménez-Crespo 2024, p. 11).
The source of the difference was the text itself. Text assets in software and games do not have a linear structure that moves forward sentence by sentence. They are stored in source files or embedded directly in the code. Nor does the user read the text from beginning to end; each user chooses their own reading path.
Once companies realised that making their products usable in other language and culture regions would increase their revenue, it also became clear that this different kind of text called for a separate approach. This is how the first localisation processes came about, and in the 1990s localisation settled in as a distinct mode of translation.
The first projects: Multiplan 1982, Apple Lisa 1983
The source book mentions two examples among the first localisation projects. The first is the 1982 Japanese version of Microsoft’s spreadsheet software Multiplan. The second is the French, German, Italian and Spanish versions of the operating system of the Apple Lisa computer, released in 1983 (Jiménez-Crespo 2024, p. 2).
The first localised versions of Microsoft Windows were published in 1986. In other words, the idea of “using software in your own language”, which looks entirely ordinary today, goes back some forty years in commercial terms. This means that localisation is not a new phenomenon but a settled body of practice.
Compared with today, the way the work was done at the time was a manual process. Localisation engineers and developers extracted the text strings embedded in the programming code into separate text files and sent those files to translators. When the translations came back, the developers put them into the code again and tested them.
FIGS-J: the first set of target languages
In the early period, not every language was targeted at once. The industry first turned to the set known as FIGS-J: French, Italian, German and Spanish, plus Japanese (Jiménez-Crespo 2024, p. 14). This choice was not linguistic but entirely commercial.
The criterion that determined the set was the purchasing power for personal computers in those markets. The cost of localising software was fixed while the return was proportional to the size of the market, so the largest markets came first. The same logic still holds today; only the countries on the list have changed.
The mark left by FIGS-J lasted a long time. The default settings of localisation tools, the file formats and even some quality criteria were shaped for many years around the characteristics of these five languages. Agglutinative languages and right-to-left languages came onto the agenda later.
As games moved from the arcade into the home
In parallel with software development, game localisation also began its global expansion. The source book dates this history to the moment when popular games such as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong moved from arcades to home consoles and personal computers (Bernal Merino 2011, cited in Jiménez-Crespo 2024, p. 14).
Home systems such as the Atari, the Commodore and the Spectrum turned the game from an arcade experience into a product. And anything that is a product has packaging, a manual and interface text; all of it needs translating. Game localisation was born in that transition.
That distinction has lasted to this day. Games are now non-linear interactive structures; they contain audio and cinematic assets, art assets, in-game text, and printed assets such as manuals, marketing material and legal documents. Each type of asset calls for a separate specialism.
Ireland and the institutionalisation of the industry
The 1980s saw the emergence of localisation centres on a global scale, the best known of which is Ireland (Esselink 2006, cited in Jiménez-Crespo 2024, p. 16). American software companies running their European operations from there gave rise to an ecosystem of specialist providers around them.
By the 1990s the industry was firmly established. Because localisation involved technology, development, cultural adaptation and testing tasks of its own, it had become distinct enough to count as a separate specialism within language services.
One consequence of this institutionalisation was a search for standards. The Localisation Industry Standards Association (LISA) was founded in this period and produced the most frequently cited definitions in the field. The association later ceased its activities, but its terminology is still in use today.
A side effect of centralisation was that the division of labour spread out geographically. Management and engineering work was carried out in one country while translation began to be given to freelancers in others. Cloud-based solutions later widened this distribution still further and made the localisation market global in the true sense.
The late 1990s: the wave of web localisation
As the internet and the World Wide Web connected the world in the late 1990s, localisation grew exponentially. The global expansion of institutions, businesses and organisations made a multilingual web presence essential, and this is how web localisation emerged (Jiménez-Crespo 2024, p. 16).
Access rates show the infrastructure behind this growth. According to InternetWorldStats data for 2024, 85 per cent of the population in Europe, 95 per cent in North America and 48 per cent in Asia can reach the internet. The languages with the most users on the internet are English, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic; all other languages together account for a share of 41.8 per cent.
The table below summarises the four waves of the industry and the new kinds of work each wave brought with it.
| Period | Trigger | Kind of work that emerged |
|---|---|---|
| 1980s | Personal computers and commercial software | Software localisation, string extraction |
| 1990s | Home consoles and the institutionalisation of the industry | Game localisation, localisation engineering |
| Late 1990s | The internet and the World Wide Web | Web localisation, content management systems |
| 2000s onwards | Smartphones, the cloud, neural machine translation | App localisation, agile workflows, post-editing |
The mobile revolution, the cloud and the picture today
The shift of personal computer work to tablets and smartphones gave rise to app localisation. Web 2.0 brought an explosion in both commercial and user-generated content, and this triggered a new wave of localisation. According to Newzoo’s 2023 assessment, the most popular games are now mobile games.
Agile and dynamic workflows were developed to meet the demand. These flows feed new source content into the process without interruption and automate the localisation of updates and additions. On sites that are updated continuously, localisation is no longer a project that closes but a process that keeps turning.
On the figures side, according to Nimdzi Insights the annual turnover of the language industry was 69.3 billion dollars in 2023, with 90.8 billion dollars forecast for 2027. According to Common Sense Advisory’s 2023 assessment, this growth has slowed markedly because of developments in machine translation and artificial intelligence.
According to Esselink’s assessment in 2022, localisation processes have not essentially changed a great deal over the past twenty years; the most visible transformation has been the move to post-editing of machine translation. Tools have become browser-based and neural machine translation has become a routine part of the toolkit, but the localiser’s daily work has remained largely the same.
The Türkiye context
Türkiye took part in these historical waves on the receiving side. In the 1990s and 2000s, Turkish was one of the target languages of foreign software; the localisation of domestic products from Turkish as the source language is a far more recent phenomenon. This meant that expertise in the industry was concentrated on the translation side for a long time.
The picture has been changing in recent years. Mobile game studios and software companies based in Türkiye are preparing their products for more than one locale. The competence needed in that situation is not only translation into a target language but internationalising the source product and managing multilingual releases.
Another difference is on the education side. In translation studies programmes in Türkiye, localisation mostly appears as one topic within a translation technologies course. There is still a distance to be closed between the engineering and testing knowledge the industry expects and the academic curriculum.
What does this mean for you?
This history explains two things on the buying side. The first is why localisation prices cannot be expressed as a single per-word figure. The second is why experienced providers ask first how your product was developed. Both are the result of forty years of accumulated practice.
- Work out which wave your product belongs to: desktop software, web, mobile app or game.
- Build your list of target locales from your own user data, not from the logic of FIGS-J.
- For products that are updated continuously, plan a recurring budget rather than a one-off project.
- In game and app projects, put non-text assets on the scope list as well.
- When choosing a provider, assess engineering and testing competence separately from translation competence.
These points will help you place your project in the right category. You can find which service item answers which need on our services page, and review the current rates on our pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Which were the first localisation projects?
The known early examples include the 1982 Japanese version of Microsoft’s spreadsheet software Multiplan and the French, German, Italian and Spanish operating system versions of the Apple Lisa computer, released in 1983. The first localised versions of Microsoft Windows were published in 1986.
What does FIGS-J mean?
FIGS-J is the abbreviation for the languages given priority as targets in early software localisation: French, Italian, German and Spanish, plus Japanese. In the international growth of companies such as Microsoft, Adobe and Oracle, this set of languages was treated as the first stop.
Why did localisation concentrate in Ireland?
In the 1980s Ireland stood out as a localisation centre on a global scale. American software companies running their European operations from there gave rise to an ecosystem of specialised service providers around them. By the 1990s, thanks to this centre, the industry had largely institutionalised.
How big is the localisation industry today?
According to Nimdzi Insights data, the annual turnover of the language industry stood at 69.3 billion dollars in 2023, with 90.8 billion dollars forecast for 2027. According to Common Sense Advisory’s 2023 assessment, this growth has now slowed markedly because of developments in machine translation and artificial intelligence.
Sources
- Jiménez-Crespo, M. A. (2024). Localization in Translation. Routledge, pp. 2, 11, 14, 16-18.
- InternetWorldStats (2024). Internet access rates by region and distribution of languages.
- Nimdzi Insights (2023) and Common Sense Advisory (2023) language industry turnover data.