[ieee ipcc 2005. proceedings. international professional communication conference, 2005. - limerick,...

2005 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference Proceedings

0-7803-9028-8/05/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE.

Communication as a Key to Global Business

Reinhard Schäler Localisation Research Centre

University of [email protected]

Abstract

Communication is the tie that binds our global community. It must be conducted in such a way that its content is accessible to all and respectful of local languages and cultures. The idea of English as a lingua franca, as the universal medium of communication among the people of the world, is extremely appealing, but while its role is important, we believe that it is essentially a fallback, a second best. We will maintain that localisation must be the key enabler for making connections in the digital world and will provide arguments based on mainstream localisation practice for those wondering whether they should localise their digital content. We will argue that current mainstream efforts are not enough to deal with the exploding volume of digital content that requires localisation into an ever-growing number of languages. We will put forward a case for a new approach, development localisation, and introduce the Global Initiative for Local Computing (GILC).

Keywords: localisation, communication, business

Language Is Communication

The mission of the technical communicator is to help engineers make the results of their work more accessible to people, using state-of-the-art digital media. The single most important task for technical communicators today is probably to help non-native English speakers communicate technical and scientific information effectively to other non-native speakers using the English language as their medium of communication.

In a world where people communicate using sophisticated and highly efficient global networks, which make boundaries formerly imposed by time and geography irrelevant, language as the means of

communication remains as one of the last barriers on the way to global understanding.

This is so because communication is essentially about making connections between human beings using language, not between digital networks using standard protocols and fibre optic cables.

To make communication possible in a multilingual, collaborative, global and digital environment, either people need to use a common language when conveying a message (today this is mainly English), or they need to adapt the source language and culture to those of the people they want to communicate with.

The alternative to teaching English to the world and then having the world communicate in English is the adaptation of what is being communicated to the language and culture prevalent among the people that one wants to communicate with. This includes the provision of services and technologies for the management of multilinguality across the digital, global information flow. In other words, the alternative to the attempt of using a lingua franca for communication is the localisation of its content.

What’s Wrong with English?

It could be argued that communication problems related to multilingualism are already solved to a large extent. English has become the language of business, science, and tourism.

Large multinational companies conduct internal communications through English. For example, Airbus, one of the world’s largest aerospace manufacturers, directly employs some 52,000 people of over 80 nationalities and 20 different languages, and English is the company’s working language. [1]

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In the aerospace industry, English is the language most widely used for writing technical documentation. However, it is often not the native language of the readers of such documentation (nor necessarily that of the writers). Many readers have only a limited knowledge of English. They are easily confused by complex sentence structures and by the number of meanings and synonyms that English words can have.

In the late 1970s, the European Association of Aerospace Industries (AECMA), on the request of the Association of European Airlines (AEA), assessed the readability of maintenance documentation in the civilian aircraft industry. The result of this effort was the AECMA Simplified English Guide, now the Specification ASD Simplified Technical English™ pending.

The primary aim of AECMA Simplified English is to help non-native-speaker readers of English language documentation in the aerospace sector understand what they read. This approach has been so successful that other non-aerospace industries have adopted the principles of the AECMA Simplified English guide for their own documentation. [2]

English is the common language of choice not just in science and technology, but also in the tourism sector. No matter whether you are in Asia, the Middle East, the Americas or Europe, chances are that English will help you order a meal, find a hotel or get directions.

Every day, hundreds of political, technical, business and academic conferences and meetings are held around the world where English native speakers, if present at all, are a minority amongst delegates. Yet, communication is conducted through the “universal” medium of English.

English has become the medium of communication in many domains. However, there is strong evidence to suggest that this is so not by choice but out of necessity and due to the lack of an alternative.

While advances in technology, trade and politics have made the world a smaller place, politics and business remain essentially local. People prefer to communicate in their own language and to conduct business in their own language.

It’s a Buyers’ Market Willy Brandt, the former German Chancellor, once highlighted the essentially local nature of business, making a strong case for the buyer’s market: “If I’m selling to you, I speak your language. If I’m buying, dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen [then you must speak German]”.

Statistics, which show that business users are three times more likely to buy when addressed in their own language, bear out this view. [3]

International Markets Outstrip the U.S.A.According to Don DePalma, founder and CEO of globalisation analysts Common Sense Advisory,exports and imports in the U.S.A. will make up roughly 20 percent of the gross domestic product in 2005, making globalisation a fact of life for most American workers. [4]

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts that world output will increase 4.4 percent in 2005, down slightly from 2004’s 4.6 percent. U.S. economic growth this year will slow to 3.9 percent. That means U.S. firms can expect profits from non-American operations to grow between 10 and 15 percent (roughly US$30-45 billion).

DePalma believes that the economic ascendance of China, India, and Russia, their investment in infrastructure, and their cultivation of consumer societies will make the next generation of the internet a much more cosmopolitan affair with much more participation by Asians, Europeans, and Latin Americans—in their own languages and using their own currencies.

The Language MythIt is widely believed that most of the world’s population speaks English to a degree that allows them to communicate and conduct business with each other in this language. The fact that English is still the dominant language on the web, seems to support this argument.

On the strength of this argument, digital content was not localised into Indian languages because there was a belief that India was an English speaking country—or that at least those with access to and a need for digital content spoke English. The reality is that around one billion Indians speak close to 2,000 languages, around 20 of them being the official languages of India. In

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fact, only 5% of the Indian population speak English. [5]

The situation is similar in South Africa where a population of more than 40 million use 11 official languages. English ranks only fifth as a mother tongue and is fully understood by only 22% of the population. [6]

Even within the European Union with its 380 million citizens and 20 official languages, it has been recognised by policy makers that everyone is entitled to information in their own language. According to the head of the European Union Directorate General Translation, Karl-Johann Loennroth, the possibility of limiting the number of official EU languages can be ruled out. [7]

While people use, accept, or sometimes just tolerate English as a means of communication, they do so only as long as there is no viable alternative.

Localisation—Opening Doors to the Digital World

The localisation industry has claimed to be fundamentally different from everything done prior to its emergence. It is the localisation industry which provides the services and the technology to people who want to communicate with their friends, colleagues, customers and clients in the digital world, not in English, but in their own language and within their own cultural reference system.

Localisation is like translation—but much more. It is like global marketing—but much broader in its approach. It touches on project management, engineering, quality assurance, and human-computer interface design issues, and covers even aspects of anthropology and international law. In the context of the phenomenal growth of the worldwide web, localisers have even started to debate issues around cultural aspects of localisation.

In the following section, we will discuss the rationale behind current, mainstream localisation efforts. We will explain why people localise and introduce the three principles of localisation. We will also question whether current, mainstream localisation efforts adequately address current and

future requirements for multi-language and multi-cultural digital content provision.

The Rationale In the following section, we will discuss the rationale behind the localisation effort: the emergence of the localisation industry, the reasons to localise, and the three principles of localisation.

The Emergence of an Industry The localisation industry as we know it today emerged in the mid 1980s. Ireland quickly became one of the world centres of localisation because of the advantage of having English as the dominant language, a highly educated but poorly paid labour force and exceptional government grants and tax incentives for an industry sector working under the label international product development.

The localisation industry in Ireland was so successful in the nineties that the country became the world’s number one exporter of software, outperforming even the United States of America – because seven out the world’s ten largest independent software developers had located their headquarters for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) in Ireland, amongst them Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Novell, Symantec, Apple/Claris, and Corel. In 2003, Ireland exported €14 billion worth of software and, according to industry observers, this figure is increasing. [8]

Between them, they covered a large proportion of the world-wide market for translation and software or web localisation. According to IDC, the global market intelligence and advisory firm in the information technology and telecommunications industries, the revenue for worldwide globalization and localization services will grow from US$3.8 billion in 2000 to US$10.3 billion in 2005. [9]

An interesting but often overlooked fact is that approximately 95% of all localised products still originate in the USA, where the overwhelming majority of digital publishers now make more money from the sales of their localised products than they make from the sales of the original product.

Microsoft, for example, has made more than 60% of its revenues from its international operation for years, with the revenue from localised products exceeding US$5 billion. In Ireland alone, Microsoft carries out more than 1,000 localisation

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projects (product/language) per year, bringing in revenues of US$1.9 billion from its international sales in 2001. [10]

Why Localise? A short survey amongst digital content publishers carried out by the Localisation Research Centre (LRC) seemed to indicate that the business case for localisation is quite straightforward—so straightforward, in fact, that many otherwise sensible business people have not more to say than well, it makes sense or everybodyelse is doing it.

Even authors of serious business books on globalisation show pictures of web sites such as that in Figure 1 and assert understatedly, If this page were all the information this company offered to world markets, it would not be the third-largest auto manufacturer in the world. [11]

Other figures often quoted in support of a localisation business case are those in relation to the evolution of the online linguistic populations and global internet statistics by language (see Figure 2 and Figure 3). [12]

According to IBM, more than two-thirds of today’s internet users are outside the United States, and IDC states that fewer than 25% of web users in 2005 live in the United States with more than 70% speaking a primary language other than English. [13]

Indeed, there seem to be plenty of examples to show that localisation is the route to take if a digital publisher is planning to increase their revenue. As already mentioned, the big three (Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle) make more than 60% of their revenue from international sales. It works for them, so it must work for everybody else.

What is often forgotten, however, is that these multinational giants have almost two decades of localisation experience behind them; i.e., they started when the world-wide web existed only in scientists’ dreams and PCs were just about to appear in highstreet shops. During this time, they have not only figured out how to bring their products to international markets efficiently and effectively, they have also made crucial mistakes and learned very expensive lessons—lessons, small and medium enterprises and even mid-sized divisions of large multinationals could not afford to take in today’s economy.

Figure 1. Toyota car sales, http://rent.toyota.co.jp

Figure 2. Online linguistic population, www.global-reach.biz/globstats

Figure 3. Online language population, www.global-reach.biz/globstats

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Just adding a line item to your budget to cover your localisation costs—which can easily be calculated by multiplying the number of words in your source product with a rate per word and adding a percentage value for project management—no longer works and, perhaps more importantly, will no longer convince senior management to allocate the necessary budget provisions to your division.

In addition, when making the case for localisation within an organisation, it is crucial to keep in mind that different groups within this organisation will have different interests and reasons to localise.

The Three Principles of Localisation In our opinion, current mainstream localisation efforts are driven mainly by three principles. They are:

1. Increase return on investment (ROI). An already developed product is superficially adapted to the requirements of foreign markets with a minimum of additional investment and is then sold in these new markets for the same price as the original product.

This principle implies that it does not always make sense to localise a product. If the target market will most likely not yield the returns necessary to justify the localisation effort (and this has to be interpreted in the widest sense) then localisation makes no sense. For example, when calculating the return on investment (ROI) in localisation, it is not sufficient to subtract the relatively well-defined costs of localisation proper from the projected return, it is also necessary to take into account other costs such as those for market entry or product support

2. Use globally acceptable content (LCD / I18N). Developers are instructed to develop products and services using content covering the lowest common denominator (LCD): the out-of-the-box product should not offend anyone and work for all locales without the need for further adaptation. In other words, services and products should be enabled and internationalised (I18N).

Colours, symbols, sound, and signs should be recognisable and understood by as many potential users as possible, independently of their linguistic or cultural background. The less adaptation that needs to be done, the higher the potential earnings from the sales of the localised product will be. The

aim is to reduce the localisation effort to translation. However, while aiming for the lowest common denominator is good for short-term revenues, the information and entertainment value of the product and/or service suffers, and, subsequently, its long-term market value will decrease.

3. Re-use (leverage) as much as possible. Translation should be automated as much as possible. Changes to the original product must be kept to an absolute minimum because each modification of the original will have to be implemented in each of the localised versions (x20, 30, or 40). Translations of previously translated, unchanged sources can automatically be inserted into the corresponding target languages of the updated version. This can be up to 80% of the total word count and offers potential savings of millions of dollars/euro.

These principles focus on short-term, financial gains. Localisation becomes a commodity, where technologies and standards are being developed to reduce the localisation effort as much as possible to an automated process, thus dramatically reducing its costs and increasing the profits of content developers and localisers alike.

While cost reductions favour localisation of digital content into languages which, because of the cost implications, could previously not be considered, localisers have to broaden their horizon and look beyond short-term ROI—if not because of a sense of social responsibility, then because of the opportunities they are going to miss otherwise in the emerging markets.

The following section will introduce a number of short case studies, among them the localisation factory, a highly automated and commoditised localisation environment, as well as some examples of what we call development localisation

initiatives, which go beyond short-term ROI-driven mainstream localisation.

Beyond the Mainstream – Case Studies In the following section, we will present three case studies: (1) The localisation factory – a fully automated, high-volume localisation environment; (2) Operating systems for the masses – Microsoft’s strategy to increase the use of ICT in ‘underserved’ communities; (3) The European Union – where the ability to communicate and access information in

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one’s own language is not a “nice-to-have” or even an option but “a question of rights, democracy, equality, as well as being part of a peace strategy and a multicultural society”.

The Localisation Factory When localisation started in the mid-1980s, large US-based developers (then known as software developers, now often referred to as “digital content publishers”) wanted to develop new markets for their products in order to increase the return on investment from their original products. In order to sell into the new markets, they needed to localise their products.

Initially, localisation was a highly specialised and labour-intensive activity. Different types of professionals were involved. These included software engineers, testers, translators, desktop publishing experts, and project managers. Although these professionals used computerised tools for their work, many of the tasks had to be carried out “by hand”. They were very labour-intensive, highly repetitive, and prone to errors, and took a long time to complete.

Today, the leaders in localisation have adapted what we call the Localisation Factory, a term first used by Tony Jewtushenko from Oracle. [14]

Localisation Factories are highly automated. They rely on tools and process and file exchange standards—all covered under the broad term of “Language Resources”. In a Localisation Factory, labour-intensive, repetitive, costly, and tedious tasks are automated.

Tony Jewtushenko described the cornerstones of the Localisation Factory as follows.

Project constraints • 4m wordcount software strings • 30 languages simultaneous release • 13,000 localisable files • Localisation group in Dublin • 5,000-person, world-wide distributed

development team

Objectives• 24/7, 100% automated process—no

exceptions• Translation in parallel with development • Translation begins at code check-in

• Translation “on demand”—no more “big project” model

Achievements • Current throughput: 100,000 language

check-ins per month • 2 million files per month • 98% of words are leveraged • Average time to process a file: 45 seconds • Fully scalable “add-a-box” model • Simpship of all 30 languages • International version testing before US

release • Reduced number of release engineers

(from 20 to 2), resulting in US$20m saving per year

• Positive ROI within 1 year

The scale of the projects handled in this environment, the turnover achieved, and the level of automation go far beyond the reach of the average localisation operation. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that this is the model for the localisation operation of the future.

The increasing demand for localised digital content in a growing number of languages, including those currently deemed to be not-financially-viable, cannot be serviced by traditional, mainstream operations anymore.

Operating Systems for the Masses Microsoft is one of the companies that has adopted a highly innovative strategy to provide language versions of its Windows operating system for countries with an expected low ROI and for emerging markets: the Language Interface Packs (LIPs). [15]

The following is an overview of the international support currently available in Windows XP, including LIPs. There are:

• 25 fully localised versions of the operating system

• 33+ Multilingual User Interfaces (MUIs)—language specific resource files which can be added to the English version of Windows

• 9 Language Interface Packs (LIPs) —they create a language skin to localise the 20% of the UI that is used 80% of the time • Costs less than $100k (not 100s of k) • Takes 5-6 weeks (not 5-6 months)

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• Less disk space: 3.5-4 MB (not 40-80 MB)

On 17 November 2004, Microsoft published an interview with Pete Hayes, Microsoft Vice President for EMEA Public Sector, in which he stated that “technology has become an integral part of the global economy. At Microsoft we have always believed that one of the most important uses for technology is to create opportunities today and for the future. As such, we have made a broad commitment to digital inclusion and to helping individuals, communities and nations gain the ICT tools and skills they need to realise their full potential.” As an example of this commitment, Pete Hayes highlighted programmes such as Partners in Learning (PiL) and the Local Language Program (LLP) implemented by Microsoft to address these issues. [16]

On the same day, Microsoft and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced a cooperation agreement that will help increase access to Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and ICT skills training in what the press release called ‘underserved’ communities. At a formal signing ceremony in Paris, Koichïro Matsuura, UNESCO’s Director General, and Bill Gates, Microsoft’s Chairman and Chief Software Architect, outlined details of the agreement. [17]

Details of the agreement include Microsoft and UNESCO focusing on increasing the use of ICT in education and learning, community access and development, and cultural and linguistic diversity and preservation.

The European Union The 25-member, enlarged European Union with its 380 million citizens has 20 official languages. (Of the 380 million EU citizens, 200 million speak only their language.)

The economically highly developed European Union perceives its linguistic and cultural diversity not as a barrier but as an opportunity for development, not as a disadvantage but as a rich heritage worth preserving. It invests large amounts of resources to ensure its survival.

Europe operates the largest language service in the world, at a cost of €800 million following the expansion (compared to €500 million prior to the expansion). As the Head of the EU Directorate

General Translation, Karl-Johan Loennroth, puts it: “Gone are the days when ‘Copyright’ was accidentally translated into French as ‘the right to copy’”.

He also highlights one of the essential beliefs of the Union: that being able to communicate and access information in one’s own language is not a “nice-to-have” or even an option but “a question of rights, democracy, equality, as well as being part of a peace strategy and a multicultural society. The possibility of limiting the number of official EU languages can be ruled out. Everyone is entitled to information in their own language.” [7]

The European Union recognises that there are standards to meet the needs of users with respect to multilinguality covering learning objects, indexing and search, metadata, and ontologies. It believes, however, that their sheer diversity serves to act as a technical barrier—and sometimes national markets are simply too small.

So barriers not only persist, they abound. The Union therefore intervenes with programmes, such as the eContent and the new eContent Plus programmes, to create the conditions to overcome these barriers by focusing on methods, tools, processes and services related to the design, development, access and distribution of high quality digital content, while leaving the actual production of digital content to market forces and, where appropriate, other specific Community initiatives. The financial envelope for the implementation of the new eContent Plus Programme is proposed to be €163 million covering a period of four years (2005-2008). [18]

Open source In China, South Korea, India, Brazil and other countries, governments are promoting the use of Open Source Software (OSS). The open-source approach has a number of attractions. Adopting open-source software can reduce costs, dispel security concerns, and ensure there is no danger of becoming too dependent on a foreign supplier. But there is another benefit: because it can be freely modified, open-source software is also easier to translate, or localise, for use in a particular language.

Large software vendors tend to support just the most widely spoken languages. Microsoft, for example, provides its Windows 2000 operating system in 24 languages, and Windows XP in 33.

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The company also supports over 20 languages in the latest version of its Office software suite.

Shikha Pillai is one of the leaders of a team in Bangalore that is translating open-source software, including OpenOffice, into ten Indian languages. “Localisation makes IT accessible to common people,” she says. “And Indian-language enabled software could revolutionise the way our communications work; even the way computers are used in India.” [19]

In May 2003, Thailand’s government launched a subsidised “people’s PC” that runs LinuxTLE, a Thai-language version of Linux. In September of the same year, Japan said it would join a project established by China and South Korea to develop localised, open-source alternatives to Microsoft’s software. Computer users around the world are discovering that open-source software speaks their language.

The open source desktop KDE is now available in 42 languages, with an additional 46 languages in the pipeline. The open source browser, Mozilla, is already available in 65 languages, with an additional 35 languages planned. The freely available OpenOffice suite has been localised into 31 locales, with another 44 coming up.

Together, KDE and Gnome are available in more than twice as many languages as industry-standard desktop interfaces.

The Global Initiative for Local Computing (GILC)

Localisation projects are, almost without exception, based on real or expected ROI, what business people call “a solid business case”.

The problem with this approach is that it ignores other, equally important but more long-term strategies for localisation, i.e., those driven by political, social, cultural and long-term investment reasons.

The current approach contributes to the growth of the digital divide between the people and countries taking part in the digital world and those who are excluded from it.

If access to the web is a distinct advantage in business and education, then those who have no

access to it (the vast majority of the world’s population today) are distinctly disadvantaged.

Some industry experts have even warned that languages and cultures not present in the digital world will eventually disappear. [20]

Basic barriers for the participation in the digital world remain, and basic issues are currently unresolved for developing countries in Africa and Asia. According to Unicode, the character encoding standards association, at the current rate it will take 700 years to encode the world’s remaining scripts in Unicode, a standard that allows for the encoding of virtually every script. Yet the estimated cost for this effort is only in the region of US$2-3 million. [21]

Eric Chinje, Veronique Danforth, and Ida Mori of the World Bank stated recently that Africa offers many opportunities for the development of the digital world but that innovation is needed to overcome existing barriers preventing access for African countries to the digital world. [22]

There seems to be a general agreement that current localisation efforts endanger languages and cultures; that a new approach, development

localisation, is needed to help with the removal of basic barriers that are preventing the entry of developing countries into the digital world and to break the negative value chain currently being applied to low ROI markets (see Figure 4).

Outlook

The trend in localisation is growth (see Figure 5).

NoMarket

NoL10N

NoDigital

Presence

NoI18N

NoSurvival

Languages and Cultures in the Digital World

Figure 4. The negative value chain for low ROImarkets

Low in value chainLow in value chainLow in value chain

High in value chainHigh in value chainHigh in value chain

Return on investment Type of market

High

Medium

Low

High GNP: highly developed infrastructureComputer literate;

North America; Euopean UnionFull localisation

Avg. GNP; infrastructure presentGrowing use of computers

China, India, Eastern EuropePartial localisation

Low GNP; developing infrastructureLow population/computer ratio

Most of Africa, some Asian regionsNo localisation

Information Information waitingwaitingto be to be localisedlocalised

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Move 1: More markets justify localisationMove 2: More information gets localised

Figure 5. ROI and market evaluation

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As the emergence of new markets makes localisation into more languages (locales)profitable, innovations such as translation memory technologies and process automation based on standards such as the XML-based Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF) have brought down the cost of localisation considerably and made possible the localisation of material which only a few years ago would never have been even considered for localisation.

Given these developments, we can identify six vectors of scalability, which we believe will drive the growth of the localisation industry in the future (see Figure 6):

CultureGeography and languages StandardsContentRationaleMedium of delivery

Medium of delivery

In September of 2005, major organisations will come together in Limerick, Ireland, to officially launch the Global Initiative for Local Computing (GILC), which will support local computing across geographical, political, social and economic divides. Using existing frameworks, GILC will build the infrastructure for regional initiatives to coordinate, pool resources, raise awareness, and communicate on a global level.

GILC will question commonly held beliefs about the rationale, scale and feasibility of localisation projects and offer solutions to people who want to participate in the digital world but are not currently served by mainstream localisation efforts.

As we said at the outset, language is the most important medium of communication, even in the digital world.

What localisation has shown us, however, is that we do not necessarily need to speak the same language to communicate effectively. To the contrary—it could well be that respect and understanding among people can only be achieved if we preserve and nurture linguistic and cultural diversity.

References

[1] “Airbus Today”. http://www.airbus.com/about/organisation.asp(accessed April 2005).

[2] Aerospace and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD), ASD Simplified Technical English Maintenance Group (STEMG), formerly the “AECMA Simplified English Maintenance Group (SEMG)”). http://www.simplifiedenglish-aecma.org/Simplified_English.htm (accessed April 2005).

[3] Heather Luscombe, “It’s Not Just About Speaking English Loudly” bigmouthmedia, 13 May 2003. http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/live/articles/its_not_just_about_speaking_english_loudly.asp(accessed April 2005).

[4] Donald A. DePalma, “English Rules the World. Why Localize?”, CMO – The Resource for Marketing Executives, 2005. http://www.cmomagazine.com/analyst/031805_csa.html (accessed April 2005).

[5] Country Studies India. http://www.country-studies.com/india/english.html (accessed April 2005).

[6] Laurette Pretorius and Sonja E. Bosch, “Enabling Computer Interaction in the Indigenous Languages of South Africa: The Central Role of Computational Morphology”,Interactions, March+April 2003.

[7] “Lost in Translation: Official EU Languages Rise to 20”, 31 March 2004. http://www.eubusiness.com/afp/040331144847.921jlht7 (accessed April 2005).

The localisation industry

Vectors of scalability and growth

Geography / Languages

Content

Medium of delivery

Europe

Documents/Boxed products

Manuals/UI

Asia

Global

CD-ROM

OnlinePure Internet-based

Generaltechnical

Anycontent

Culture

Symbols

Rights

Values

Rationale

Standards

Trial & Error

Proprietary

Open

ROI

Investment

Rights-based

Figure 6. Growth in the localisation industry

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[8] Kevin Hoffmann, “How the Celtic Tiger Became the World’s Software Export Champ”, Der Spiegel, 26 March 2005. http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,348682,00.html (accessed April 2005).

[9] Alexander Motsenigos, WorldwideGlobalization and Localization Services Market Forecast and Analysis, 2000-2001. IDC, 2001.

[10] Steve Ballmer, “Microsoft Reports Substantial Growth”, The Irish Times, 21 October 2002.

[11] Don A. DePalma, Business Without Borders, A Strategic Guide To Global Marketing. New York, 2002.

[12] “Global Internet Statistics (by Language)”, Global Reach. www.global-reach.biz/globstats(accessed April 2005).

[13] IBM, “Globalizing Your e-Business”. www-3.ibm.com/software/globalisation/story.jsp (accessed April 2005).

[14] Tony Jewtushenko, “Use Case for Translating Oracle Technology using Web Services”, LRC2002 Conference, Limerick, Ireland, 11-12 November 2002

[15] “Windows XP Professional Language Interface Pack (LIP)”. http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/LIPFaq.mspx (accessed April 2005).

[16] “UNESCO and Microsoft to Focus on Technology in Joint Initiative for Community Development, Paris, France, 17 November 2004”. http://www.microsoft.com/emea/pressCentre/UNESCO.mspx (accessed April 2005).

[17] “Microsoft and UNESCO Announce Joint Education and Community Development Initiatives, Paris 17.11.2004”. www.microsoft.com/emea/presscentre/PressRelease.aspx?file=MSUNESCOPREMEA.xml (accessed April 2005).

[18] European Commission, “The European Union eContent Programme”. www.cordis.lu/econtent(accessed April 2005).

[19] “Open Source’s Local Heroes—Software: If the Commercial Sort Does Not Speak Your

Language, Open-Source Software May Well Do So Instead”, The Economist, 4 December 2003. http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=2246308 (accessed April 2005).

[20] David Brooks, “Any Language That Is Not Captured in This Electronic World Will Soon Become Obsolete”, First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Granada, Spain, 28-30 May 1998.

[21] Deborah Anderson, “The Digital Divide and the Script Encoding Initiative”, Unicode 24,Atlanta, GA, USA., 3-5 September 2003, and private communications, www.unicode.org.

[22] Eric Chinje, Veronique Danforth and Ida Mori, “Excuse Me, Again: Where?”, LocalizationWorld, Seattle, WA, USA, 14-16 October 2003. www.worldbank.org/afr.

About the Author

Reinhard Schäler has been involved in the localisation industry in a variety of roles since 1987. He is the founder and director of the Localisation Research Centre (LRC) at the University of Limerick, was a founding member and chairperson of the Software Localisation Interest Group (SLIG), is the editor of the quarterly journal Localisation Focus – The International Journal for Localisation, a founding editor of the Journal of Specialised Translation (JosTrans), a member of the editorial board of Multilingual Computing, a founder and CEO of The Institute of Localisation Professionals (TILP), a member of the OASIS Technical Committee on the XML-based Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF) and vice chair of the OASIS Technical Committee on Translation Web Services. He has joined the Internationalisation and Unicode Conference Committee and is coordinating a localisation stream for the Unicode Conferences. He is a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems (CSIS) at the University of Limerick.

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