Humanities & Social Sciences 3 (2017 10) 288-297 ~ ~ ~ УДК 347.78.034 Rethinking the Scope of Localization Andrei A. Achkasov* St. Petersburg State University 7/9 Universitetskaya nab., St. Petersburg, 199034 Russia Received 14.09.2016, received in revised form 10.10.2016, accepted 10.01.2017 Over the last three decades the scope of localization has extended from software localization to other digital products and is increasingly related to audiovisual and news translation and the translation of comics translation. <...> The last decade has revealed a tendency to expand the concept of ‘localization’ to non-digital products and a range of business processes in cross-cultural management and marketing. <...> Conceptual potential of the term ‘localization’ seems to exceed all other variants of naming linguistic, cultural, social, economic, political, legal, etc. aspects of product adaptation and is favored in industry, related research, academia and Translation Studies as a generic concept for all types of complex content modifications. <...> When taken broadly as ‘adaptation’, localization covers any type of interlingual or intralingual reworking or rewriting of texts, including cultural domestication, adaptation of plays for children or novels for broadcasting, or even more: “We might see the joke we tell as a localization of the joke previously heard, or Joyce’s Ulysses as localizing Homer’s Odyssey, or indeed most texts can be seen as whole or partial rewrites and thus recall © Siberian Federal University. <...> All rights reserved * Corresponding author E-mail address: a.achkasov@spbu.ru – 288 – some sense of localization” (Pym 2004: 4-5). <...> In Translation Studies such tentative observations have not evolved into any kind of systematic framework and are invoked by analogy to localization ‘proper’ that has been traditionally confined to digital products, translation technologies, and project management. <...> As the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies points out, “it is… important to highlight what makes localization, as we refer to it today, different from previous, similar activities, namely that it deals with digital material. <...> To be adapted or localized, digital material requires tools and technologies, skills, processes and standards that are different from those required for the adaptation of traditional material such as paperbased print or Andrei A. Achkasov. <...> Localization as we know it <...>