The intersection of localization and translation: A corpus study of Spanish original and localized web forms

For over two decades, the localization industry has striven to produce non-culture-specific texts that can be easily localized into most languages. Nevertheless, contrastive studies have shown that certain features of texts can vary between source and target cultures, such as textual structure or genre-specific terminology and phraseology. This study explores these two seemingly contradictory perspectives through a corpus analysis of original and localized Spanish web forms. Following a genre-based approach (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993; Gamero 2001), the main analysis concentrates on macrostructural differences and the formulation of conventional linguistic forms associated with rhetorical moves. Significant differences are found in the structural, pragmatic, lexical and syntactical configuration of localized texts as contrasted to online forms spontaneously produced in Spanish. The results shed some light on the question of whether texts can be fully internationalized during the development stages and on the inevitable effect of technological and cognitive constraints during the translation process.