To explain this issue, let's analyse a given situation: suppose someone is working for a company that, until now, has operated exclusively in the United States. However, your company is now opening a major office in China, and you need a website for this country, evidently, translated into Chinese. You'll be offering pretty much the same products and services in both countries, with only some minor differences, but perhaps some of the elements that appeared in your original United States targeted website (use of flags, colours, national-embedded images, songs) are offensive or upsetting. Thus, that person might lose a potential market only because of small details of presentation. Observe the cultural gap there is between most oriental cultures and European-occidental ones. Furthermore, this person might need to adapt the product to its new buyers; video games are the best example. To illustrate this, read the following articles published in the October/November 2008 edition of the specialized magazine Multilingual: "Practical skills for video game translators" or "Preserving the spell in games localization".
Now, suppose instead that this man's company has major offices in a dozen countries, and he needs a specifically-designed website in each of these countries. Before he decides how to localise the website and the products offered in it any given country, a professional in the area might advise him to create an overall strategy: to globalise (the way an organization does business). And he might want to design a framework to codify and support this global strategy. The globalisation strategy and the globalisation framework will provide uniform guidance for your 12 separate localisation efforts and will earn a lot of time and money for him, as a businessman, and for the group of localisers and translators hired for the project.

Globalisation "versus" localisation
The overall process: internationalisation, globalisation and localisation
Translation "versus" localisation
Language tags and codes