[Sigia-l] notation for locales

[Ruth Kaufman]

> The question being at what level of granularity you're actually going
> to have to work. At its most granular, a locale is a single person :-)
> [1]
>
> Most situations aren't going to need anything more granular than
> two-part language codes ('fr-ca') for now. However something like a
> website that provides city-local information might want to know which
> city a user is in, and which language they prefer (out of a range of
> languages spoken in that city, perhaps) to enable them to filter/order
> search results, change up-sell panels, and various other pieces of
> slightly more subtle localisation than just translation, layout,
> colour, collation, date format and so on. (For instance, if you're in
> Brighton, UK it's entirely reasonable to go to London for the evening;
> it may be less reasonable to go to somewhere that's actually closer,
> if the transport options are against you.)

My understanding is that historically locales have, for the most part
(I'm sure there are exceptions), reflected a company's presence in a
given market, as defined by sales and marketing or even other
operations (e.g., supply chain). For example, most companies that do
business internationally will either set up shop in, say, Germany or
they won't. If they do, they'll probably have a web site for the
German market, and they may also localize their product to Germany
(packaging, labels on the product, etc... whether media, software or
household appliances). They may have a branch office in Frankfurt, but
it's unlikely that they'd localize content for the people of
Frankfurt. Think of realtors in the US. Their service offering may
only be relevant to people living in a small region, such as Research
Triangle Park in North Carolina, but that doesn't mean that the
content of the site isn't technically consumable by anyone who can
read English, regardless of where they currently live or their
propensity to buy real estate in North Carolina. The content is simply
available in US English, and users are left to figure out if the
company's or site's offerings are relevant and useful to them.

The way you're exploring this topic is to bridge conceptually between
geographically-defined markets and more granular geographic regions...
and, by extension, the relevance of information to individuals living
in, passing through, or simply interested in these regions. It brings
to mind geo tagging. It's interesting to think of that as a form of
localization. I wouldn't use locale notation for geo-tagging. Through
observation, it seems people doing geo-tagging with postal addresses,
lat/long coordinates, zip codes, states, countries, and/or cross
streets. If asked to develop a data model, I would leave language out
of geo-tagging and treat it as a separate facet of the information.

As places and regions are intrinsically spatial, it also brings to
mind event-based targeting, whether through tagging or otherwise --
the temporal complement to geo-tagging?

Ruth

P.S. You did catch a typo of mine. CN is usually China, not Canada.
You got it right, CA.