The Localisation Industry Standards Association (LISA) defines localisation as follows:
Localisation (L10n) involves taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region and language) where it will be used and sold.

• Checking source material, file sanctity and completeness of the localisation kit.
• Configuring build environments.
• Test-Compiling by performing pseudo-translation.
• Dialog Box Resizing.
• Checking for duplicate hot keys.
• Leveraging of dialog co-ordinates and text from previous versions, processing updates.
• Bitmap Editing.
• Creation of Installers.

• Linguistic Test: Linguistic verification of the running application, display of accented characters, checking of punctuations, hyphenation rules, consistency of translations, etc.
• Cosmetic (UI) Test: Focuses on all visual aspects of a localised application i.e., the user interface. Testing is done for truncated strings, overlapping controls, display of dynamic dialog boxes, duplicate hot keys etc. Testing is done both in the resource editor and for the running application.
• Functionality Test: This test focuses on the actual functionality of the localised application. Testing is done to ensure that the functionality and feature set of the localised application mirror that of the source language.
• Logging of bugs in a bug database.

• Translation of HTML Help, Win Help files, including RTF and CNT files.
• Translation of jumps, popups, footnotes.
• Translation of tagged format files like HTML, XML.
• Translation of parsed text files, Java files, Read-Me files.