The Urban Nomad

Sounds familiar? Like someone we’ve transformed into, slowly and steadily, encapsulated by the virtual ritual. Yep, we’re on the GO.  And we demand instant, interactive information anytime anywhere. The Urban Nomad in us is never bound to one place. Wherever we are, across oceans and continents, our carry-on mobile device is our port of communication with the world around us. We pull it out to check our calendar, to interface with our connections, to play games, purchase goods, manage photos, read books, watch movies, or just idly slide-flick through its menu bar, while waiting for our transit.  If 2011 was crowned as the year of the tablet, 2012 is the year of the ultra-thin, ultra-light ultra-book black box, leaving laptops and PCs in the backseat.

Mobile Commerce: Stand out in the Cloud

Mobile web traffic is already surpassing PC-based traffic. According to ABI Research, by 2015 mobile commerce will have reached $119B worth of goods and services purchased via mobile phone. In the less developed world, mobile phones will play a center role in e-commerce, as they are often the only pathway to the internet. This means that companies are now quickly planning their mobile commerce strategy to get a fore and stand out in the cloud within this dominant market. Mobile storefronts now fit into companies’ broader multichannel outreach to consumers. Therefore, when we examine pipeline paths for the localization industry, it is the mobile vertical that frantically calls for our attention.

Reaching Markup Goals

One of the key hurdles localization vendors face in the mobile vertical is the conceptual method of budgeting localization accounts. In most other verticals, reaching markup revenue goals is largely determined by word count volumes. In the mobile arena, however, text is minimal and LSPs need to transition their work scope budgeting to a different ball game model. Typical features in mobile localization are short user interface strings, multiple target language simship releases, focus on layout design, on usability and on compatibility with a variety of platforms: iOS, Android, BlackBerry. Culturalization plays a key role in mobile localization, culturally adapting the usability and design elements to enable a native look & feel for each market.

Global Strategy for New Market Entry

When you explore new market opportunities for your application performance, research what types of applications are popular in the target markets. Brazil, Russia, India, China, Japan and Korea are markets with heavily growing mobile traffic use: smartphone sales, apps store installation, ads revenue and virtual goods consumption.

Visibility & Usability

We often customize the application performance, usability and functionality to the locale culture and usability. Another consideration is determining dominant mobile operating systems and carriers in the target markets. For example, China Mobile is the leading carrier in China. In the Arab world, BlackBerry is still the leading device, while Apple iOS takes the 2^nd place trophy. Switzerland is an example for a challenging mobile market, featuring three spoken languages: French, German and Italian; three dominant operating systems: iOS, BlackBerry and Android; three major carriers selling these operating systems: Swisscom, Sunrise and Orange. This translates into a total of 27 test instances, all for one market locale!

Got Game? Measuring ROI of Localized Goods

ROI from localized apps is given, providing you implement sustainable and scalable localization processes and conduct careful market research for product acceptance in new market entry. Electronic Arts’ revamped car racing games localized into Russian yielded a 600% ROI over the English version! Likewise, Julio Vieitez, Director of LUG—distributor of online games in Brazil, reported that a game version localized into Brazilian Portuguese yielded a 15 times higher revenue than the English version in the local market. Not bad for ROI! An example for revenue loss due to mis-culturalization is when “Age of Empire” was localized into Greek. It was banned by the Greek government because of the name “Macedonian.”

Find out who loves your apps and make them love you more. Determine the top-three non-English locales for your apps traction. Localize into these three target languages first, as a tier-one pilot. Not all languages in a localized app will generate significant added revenue. Make sure your translators understand your app and are active users. Detecting terminology nuances is a landmine in apps localization, where jargon and context shape the content. For example, the Chinese translated term for “User” is different in a standard app compared to a gaming app.

It’s the Urban Nomad Bit Again, for Closure

The Early Nomad would travel in search of fresh pasture. The Urban Nomad travels in search of fresh opportunities. His modular, fast pace life style demands multiple adjustments, relocating from one place to another. But all along it is the little lit screen flickering in the back pocket that keeps the humdrum aligned, centralized in cyber space, home away from home.

Read more here: http://copyous.com/mobilizing-mobile-for-the-worldwide-urban-nomad

About Talia/Copyous

Talia is an independent localization and culturalization consultant with 17 years experience optimizing companies’ international outreach. She founded Copyous, devoted to fitted localization program development and management for companies’ go global goals. Talia is a frequent speaker at principal localization and internationalization conferences and an avid contributor at industry roundtables. Learn more about Copyous at www.copyous.com. Contact Talia at talia@copyous.com, or via LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/taliabaruch and Twitter @TaliaBaruch.

Webinar recording: “Mobile Apps & Games Internationalization and Globalization” with Danica Brinton and Adam Asnes available for request: http://www.lingoport.com/webinars/mobile-apps-i18n-global-games-l10n-mobile-internationalization-localization/

Guest Article: Social & Mobile Apps and Globalization – Confessions of a g11n Veteran

By Danica Brinton, CEO of LocLabs. Connect with Danica & LocLabs on Facebook at Facebook.com/LocLabs.

I have been in the international-production, international-product-management and globalization business for over 12 years. Over the past four, I have been focused on online games, social and mobile games and applications. I realize that my continued focus on and fascination with this particular area has a lot to do with the instant gratification that results from globalizing in the social/mobile space. Sure I have seen great results from globalizing software, handhelds, CPU’s, search and web services, but the dramatic increase in the overall user base and revenue coming from localization of social games, mobile games and applications provides the best – and the most immediate – business case to invest in international expansion. I find that I must put in place the following prerequisites in order to secure both a quick return on the investment and a continued long-term growth:

1. Market-tier strategy based on extensive market research, statistical data analysis, competitive study and multi-factor estimates/projections.
2. Language-selection strategy based on the market-tier strategy, analysis of the barrier to entry in a given market, legal and cultural investigation
3. Locale-specific product positioning
4. Internationalization with the standard and scalable framework to support rapid continuous SBML/simship localization
5. International payments strategy that encompasses a comprehensive set of locally popular payment methods and local currencies
6. Cross-functional organization to support global operations
7. International production organization that understands the specifics, intricacies and unique challenges posed by the social/mobile app development and rapid market movements
8. Scalable localization processes, tools and infrastructure adapted to the content, platform, speed of development, release processes, market requirements, and budget constraints
9. High-quality of translation

Social and Mobile Apps Localization

Fast-moving social and mobile apps prominently require continuous localization, tightly integrated into the build system, in SBML (single-binary multilingual) simship method. At Zynga, for example, we introduced daily releases in SBML/simship for up to 18 languages.

Other than aggressive and frequent simship releases, the new social and mobile apps also require that they be localized at launch into as many languages as planned. Staggered releases will not be nearly as successful as out-of-the-gate simship.

No doubt about it, social games will be played by millions of people but only if the game and its language are compelling enough to draw the user into the game. The viral nature of these games allows a player to pull in dozens of their Facebook friends. This can only happen if a user enjoys the game and its mechanics so much that they want to brag about it to their friends . The game mechanics are heavily verbal and any barrier to immersion, particularly any issues in the target-language must be removed. As a rule, the English text in these games is 1. written rapidly, conforming to the speed of development; 2. full of American slang. Even though it is string based and highly technical in the approach, game translation is more akin to literary translation and international copy writing than software string translation.

Trends in Mobile and Games Globalization

A large % of social game players have friends in other countries and play social games with speakers of different languages. After all, more than 75% of Facebook is outside of the US. The multilingual nature of the game virals becomes another unique translation and internationalization/localizaton challenge.

Most prominent social games have over 70% of the overall user base and over 50% of revenue coming from localized locales – localization can increase the locale-specific traffic by 80%-300%. I’ve seen that localized mobile apps can expect to expand their user base and downloads by 40%-50% when the developer adopts the right strategies and is willing to implement an aggressive continuous localization. As mobile games get more viral features and capabilities AND as the smart-phone adoption grows internationally, that percentage will continue to grow rapidly.

Another new trend is cross-platform apps and games – releasing games that can be simultaneously/real-time played on multiple devices, i.e. switching from Facebook to iPhone to Android. Localization of these apps has its own set of challenges that appropriate locale strategies and continuous localization can address.

The market tier strategy is different for FB vs. iPhone vs. Android apps. However, the common thread is that new markets are emerging in top tier language sets in all three platforms. For example, Turkish, Norwegian, and Brazilian Portuguese are counted in the tier-1 language set for many social games on Facebook alongside more traditional FIGS. Meanwhile, the poster child of tier-1 markets — Japan — falls into tier-3 on the Facebook platform. And China is not accessible for Facebook users.

Some new languages can be very profitable but their globalization could become a huge challenge for the new app makers unaccustomed to i18n or l10n. At LocLabs, for instance, we built large teams and extensive expertise to support Arabic and Thai globalization for Apple as well as a number of our app-developer clients.

Mobile and Games Globalization in Emerging Markets

Often quoted is the fact about rapid growth of the India and China mobile markets. While I found that India and China are incredible new mobile markets, India does not still necessitate language localization and Mainland China is still not ROI positive for smart-phone app localization. Taiwan and Hong Kong are profitable but small. Smart-phone manufacturers, however, are eagerly competing for the Asian market and are incentivizing app makers to localize into Chinese and Korean, prominently.

Much of the above content will be discussed in more detail in the upcoming webinar on Games and Mobile App Globalization that I am holding on December 1st with Adam Asnes of Lingoport.

About LocLabs

Danica Brinton runs her own company, LocLabs, specializing in international product management, international strategy, localizability/i18n, localization, localization testing, content management, and international feature development. Danica has held leadership positions in international product management, strategy and globalization at Zynga, Yahoo!, Second Life, Ask.com, and Apple, Inc. Connect with Danica and LocLabs at Facebook.com/LocLabs or send her an email at danica (at) loclabs.com.

Download “Keyboards and Internationalization White Paper” in .pdf format.

Introduction

Congratulations, your software is now shipping throughout the world. Now, what happens to folks who need to enter data? What happens if your clients want to enter Japanese ideograms? Could they do that with a US keyboard? Conversely, what if Japanese users need to type in US text? Is your application able to handle switching from one locale to another and still let the user enter data?

The video below gives an introduction to how a user would adapt an on-screen keyboard to different input methods.

Lingoport offers internationalization (i18n) expertise, products, and services. In our experience, especially with desktop applications, keyboards are shrouded in mystery when it comes to i18n. In this article, we intend to clarify keyboards and their interactions in international markets.

Keyboards Basics

Keyboards are mostly hardware devices which send codes to an operating system. Those codes correspond to letters. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_(computing):

“Computer keyboards include control circuitry to convert key presses into key codes that the computer’s electronics can understand.”

“The character code produced by any key press is determined by the keyboard driver software. A key press generates a scancode which is interpreted as an alphanumeric character or control function.”

The input character code can they be mapped to a character for a given OS. The fact that I click on the ‘a’ letter on my keyboard does not always mean the letter ‘a’ will be input in my software. It depends mostly on operating system settings.

Keyboard Layouts Examples

Here are some keyboard layouts for different languages:

Figure 1: Hebrew keyboard (Google Translate)

Figure 2: Russian keyboard (Google translate)

Japanese needs to handle hiragana, katakana, and ideographs. A software keyboard (for a touch screen, used more and more for different devices, from hand-held phones to embedded devices) could follow this pattern, where the layout and the keys switch from one to the other and to US English keyboard using control keys:

Mapping Between Keyboard and Actual Input

Keeping the same hardware keyboard, a regular US keyboard, let’s change the Microsoft setting for this combination of keys: “q`az^o”.

IME: Input Method Editor

Background

Some writing systems have thousands of possible ideographs, like Chinese and Japanese. Some writing systems are based on ideographic stems, like Korean. Let’s take Chinese to illustrate the major points.

Because the set of Chinese characters is so huge, it is highly impractical (and for any practical keyboard, impossible) to try to map each character to a single key. Therefore, inputting Chinese characters resort to schemes involving sequences of key presses to select specific Chinese characters or sequences of characters from the available repertoire supported.

IME

An Input Method Editor is shortened to IME or sometimes called Input Method. It is a scheme to input Chinese or Japanese characters using a reduced set of keys. Depending on what particular method is used to input and select particular characters, IME’s have specific names. They may also differ in strategy between inputting Chinese characters for the Chinese language and Chinese characters for the Japanese language (kanji), based on different linguistic expectations of the users and differences in the particular repertoire of characters that needs to be supported.

The ideogram “人員 ” is obtained by typing the following sequence typed on a US keyboard “o<Space><Shift>8<space>”, with the following IME setting: “CH, Chinese Traditional ChangJie”.

Common input methods for Chinese make use of romanization. Others are based on character component and stroke-based methods. There is also direct input of hexadecimal character values.

Chinese IME Types

Romanization

漢語拼音, Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, or just “pinyin” for short is the most common Chinese IME. Pinyin represents each syllable of Beijing Chinese (People’s Republic of China Modern Standard) by means of a combination of Latin characters, optionally modified by tone marks. The tone marks consist either of numbers at the end of the syllable or diacritics placed on the main vowel.

A given syllable as romanized in pinyin may correspond to one or — more often — to many particular Chinese characters. The user types in the pinyin syllable as a sequence of Latin characters (and the tone indicators). When the syllable is to be converted to the correct Chinese character for input, the input method presents the user with a choice of ideograms having that pronunciation.

The user can select one of them by use of the mouse or by shifting a selection number.

Component- and stroke-based IME

Learning to write Chinese by hand involves learning basic strokes. This type of IME is based on the graphological aspect of the characters. Each graphical unit is represented by a basic character component. There are 24 components in all, each mapped to a particular letter key on a standard QWERTY keyboard. The user types some base strokes represented on the keyboard and the IME proposes a set of ideograms which could be derived from the sequence. The user then selects an ideogram either by clicking with a mouse or by a number associated with it.

Chinese Layout and IME

Overview

The codes of three input methods are typically printed on the Chinese (traditional) keyboard:

• Zhuyin, upper right; 
• Cangjie, lower left; and 
• Dayi, lower right.

Bopomofo/Zhuyin fuhao:

(pinyin: Zhùyīn fúhào; Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄨˊ ㄏㄠˋ; literally “phonetic symbol”) or zhuyin fuxao, often abbreviated as zhuyin and colloquially called bopomofo,[1] was introduced in the 1910s as the first official phonetic system for transcribing Chinese, especially Mandarin.

Consisting of 37 characters and four tone marks, it transcribes all possible sounds in Mandarin. Despite being phased out in China in the 1950s, this system is still widely used as an educational tool and in Taiwan.

ChangJie or Cangjie:

The ChangJie IME is based on the basic strokes of the ideograms which give it its shape.

Dayi:

Dayi (Chinese: 大易; pinyin: dàyì, literally “big easy”) uses a set of 46 character components laid out on a standard QWERTY keyboard. A Chinese character is built by combining up to four of the 40 of the 46 characters (the other six are provided for typing Taiwanese addresses), using a system similar to that of Cangjie, but is decomposed in stroke order instead of in geometric shape in Cangjie.

In-Depth Look at Regional and Keyboard Settings

Most operating systems will let you switch between settings for your keyboard. It does not necessarily mean you have to switch the hardware keyboard, even though it may seem natural. You could type US English text with a Russian hardware keyboard for instance; it may be easier to plug in a US English keyboard for those operating system settings.

The following gives an example of settings on Windows XP to indicate which layout the user will be using, i.e. which actual software character/text will be input when clicking on a hardware or software key. Other windows systems will have similar configurations. The target locales are Chinese and Turkish for the purpose of this illustration. Other languages follow the same settings.

1. Add Chinese and Turkish to the language settings of your system. Go to Windows status bar and click “Start | Settings | Control Panel”. Double click the icon “Regional and Language”. Depending on your version of Windows, it may look like the following:
2. On the “Languages” tab, check the box before “Install files for East Asian Languages” or other languages as needed under section “Supplemental language support.”Note: after this step, you may have to reboot the system.
3. On the Advanced tab, make sure the code pages conversion tables are setup for those programs not using Unicode. Here is the Turkish example. The East Asian languages are at the top of the list.
   
   
   
4. Open the Text Services and input Languages dialog by right clicking on the “CH” or “EN” or “TR” language symbol in the bottom right of your screen. Add the keyboard needed for Chinese (depending on the client, it could be for instance Chinese PRC – Microsoft Pinyin) or Turkish (Q for Turkish).
5. After Windows copied some files into your local drive, you will be prompted the following Window. Click the “Yes” button. You can then be prompted to restart Windows. Click Yes button to restart Windows.
6. After Windows is restarted, a language input icon will be displayed on your Windows status bar.

Move the cursor on top of “EN” icon, click the right mouse button, then click the “Properties” button.
7. On the “Input Locales” tab, select “CH Chinese (PRC)   Chinese (Simplifies) – US Keyboard” entry, then click on the “Properties” button.
8. On the “Input Locale Properties” window, select the input method you prefer. If you know Pinyin, you can choose “Chinese (Simplified) – MS-PinYin98″ and click OK button.
9. After you come back to the “Regional Options” window, the Chinese input icon will be changed to MS-PinYin98. If you want, you can set this input method as the default by clicking on the “Set as Default” button. Click OK button to close this window.
10. For the same language, you may have installed different keyboards. For instance, Turkish shows two different ones:
11. At that point, opening an editor like Notepad will let you type text in with a keyboard configured for a language with an input method and font set up to display the text correctly. You may still have an English hardware keyboard, but it will act, for example, like a Turkish keyboard.

Internationalization Expertise and Solutions

Lingoport offers a wide range of internationalization services combined with the power of our Globalyzer i18n software, a client/server software system that works together to scan code and step engineers through internationalization issues in a wide variety of programming languages, to help your company achieve its global software release goals on time and on budget.

Our teams of architects, project leaders and engineers will help you meet your global release objectives while augmenting your engineering team’s product development efforts.

Lingoport’s internationalization expertise and services include:

• Internationalization planning, requirements development and assessments
• Detailed code review, architectural direction, project planning
• Internationalization software development
• Globalization testing
• Internationalization training and more.

How do I get started with Lingoport and Globalyzer?

• Contact Lingoport for a technical discussion, a free quote, or a guided tour and demonstration of Globalyzer.
• Visit http://globalyzer.com and register for a free trial account (view a short intro video about Globalyzer).
• Visit our i18n and L10n resources page to view informational and educational internationalization and localization videos and webinars.
• Click here to download our internationalization services and tools brochure in .pdf format.
• Or simply call us at: +1 (303) 444-8020 (US).

We look forward to hearing from you!

A Hot Topic

Agile development is such a hot topic these days because it represents a change in how software is developed. More specifically, it has proven successful in producing highly productive results. It has a lot of developers very excited, and at this point, it’s hardly going away. That’s why back at Localization World Seattle in October, I was disappointed that a featured panel discussion about localization and agile development seemed to be more about the frustration of how three-week development sprints are incompatible with large localization efforts. I understand both sides of this argument, but I think the opportunity and consequently the impact on software localization practices here are potentially exciting.

Let’s step back a bit and look a little at the business and process drivers for agile. For those not following software development, agile is a management process with narrow and reduced scope that breaks down tasks into smaller efforts, where the object is to make product development advances in short cycles, typically three-week sprints. At the end of the three weeks, there can be a new release, or not, but agile cycles do result in more releases over far shorter periods of time than have been traditional in software production. This is exciting for development teams, even on an individual level for the very human reason that it’s really cool to build new stuff and see it come to fruition without getting caught in organizational planning and task bottlenecks. It’s even better for the customers, as they get new features faster, without having to wait for monumental releases that used to only happen perhaps once or twice a year.

There are all kinds of other benefits, and a quick search will teach you the basic concepts.

Internationalization and Agile

Internationalization is really just a part of the software development process. Hence, it can fit into agile quite nicely, at least in the case of ongoing internationalization as part of an already internationalized product. In the case of internationalizing legacy code, usually a separate code branching effort is required, and the cycle will be quite different than typical sprint-feature development.

For ongoing development, internationalization has to be understood as meaning more than just embedding strings. Every programming language and architecture have potential unique functional issues relating to internationalization. This is where measuring with static analysis tools gives you good assessment and ongoing metrics data rather than just relying on iterative, limited testing. There is a business and process value to knowing your product is internationalized, and that never gets finished, especially with agile, as there is so much new rapid development combined with less dependency on formal design.

Localization and Agile

The process of localization as it has been simply can’t comfortably keep up with agile release cycles. The challenge is that it’s very possible that new feature strings for translation might not be finalized until late in a sprint, and then they have to be compared for context with the rest of the application and perhaps translated into a multitude of languages, with new language packs and installers needing creation and testing. Localization likely just does not fit into that initial sprint. It follows that localization may have to be broken up into demonstrable sections. Some locales could possibly take precedence. In many cases, individual sprints will not result in large changes or word counts to the interface, but these sprints must be localization managed. It would be important to include developers in localization process awareness. Giving a localization manager advanced notice of what’s coming is a simple, low-cost place to start. Another solution is to aggregate releases for localization events, which will significantly lag behind development. Think of it as a waterfall process managed by agile methods. That is not exactly ideal for customers depending on those localizations, and they lose faster access to new features that agile enables. Plus it creates a competitive opportunity.

• Why should customers outside of the home market have to wait for three or four sprints? I’d recommend a clear plan to demonstrate that you aren’t falling behind too far. So what’s an agile, but globally-focused company to do?

• Educate the teams with the business, process and technical opportunities and ramifications of internationalization and localization. Start with the product owner (such as a product manager). This person leads features and release schedules. Confirm marketing and business impact of internationalization and localization. Confirm internationalization standards and requirements. Organize the localization backlog and release schedule, mapped to various sprints.

• Have a scrum master. This person manages the actual work produced by developers during sprint efforts. Make sure he or she is aware of global requirements and processes per the product owner. Bring localization manager(s) into scrum planning. Include internationalization criteria in development and testing. Measure internationalization with tools, not just by mucking about with a few screens. Get new strings to the localization manager as soon as possible.

• Have the localization manager work on creating internationalization and localization design patterns, which should be clear and reusable for sprint efforts. Track terminology and help developers with consistency of content creation in the interface and documentation. Perhaps a reach, but at least build in time for content review.

• In documentation, consider tools such as acrolinx to help make descriptions more localizable, rather than reinventing descriptions over and over.

• Consider new ways to see application translation in context, rather than the traditional list of strings. There are new tools coming to the market that emphasize product context views of translations. They are more applicable to browser based and multitiered applications than traditional tools that are limited to client applications. Some of the crowd-sharing site translation efforts are using early forms of this technology. Getting a contextual view drastically reduces the time and burden of linguistic context testing.

• Work with a localization company that understands and can move quickly with you. I’ve seen considerable differentiation among localization companies in regard to understanding development processes. The best partners are capable of enhancing your planning.

Conclusion

All of these efforts will take time, money and a focused initiative. That’s how it is with change. The move to agile took investment in training, new process thinking and tools. In many companies, localization has been an afterthought to development, but as global revenues command more of a company’s profits, the strategic and tactical efforts of internationalization and localization must catch up. Likewise, localization professionals will be charged with leading the effort, requiring them to contribute with ideas and improvements.

About the Author

Adam Asnes is President and CEO at Lingoport and enjoys investigating how globalization technology affects businesses expanding their worldwide reach. Adam is a sought after speaker at industry events and a columnist on globalization technology as it affects businesses expanding their worldwide reach. He often writes articles for localization, internationalization and globalization industry publications and enjoys cycling and Colorado’s Rocky Mountains; he can be reached by clicking here.

Lingoport’s Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (L10n) Tools and Consulting Solutions

Founded in 2001, Lingoport provides extensive software localization and internationalization consulting services. Lingoport’s Globalyzer software, a market leading software internationalization tool, helps entire enterprises and development teams to effectively internationalize existing and newly developed source code and to prepare their applications for localization.

For more information on how Lingoport can assist you with all of your internationalization and localization needs, please contact us at info@lingoport.com, call 303.444.8020, or complete the quote request form.

Good, Quick, and Cheap?

Good, quick, cheap – pick any two. Project managers will tell you this project triangle is the way it has to be. Fair enough in the short run, but there is a dynamic perspective to this particular triangle that static view will ignore.

Fulfilling New Market Vistas and Adaptation

A truism of technology is that it serves as a great flattener, ultimately destroying pricing and economies in one area, only to give rise to new and hopefully broadening opportunities. The rise and effect of communication technologies that join markets, customers and workers are a remarkable example accelerating change in the speed of fulfilling new market vistas and adaptation. Our industry thrives in this, connecting products, messages, vendors, clients and communities in far flung cultures. Yet, the barrier to entering the localization industry is really not so tough. You need a bit of expertise, contacts, some sales savvy and you’re in business. No expensive machinery, or large capitalization needed. But at some point, you’re going to need something to help you shrink the distances separating good, quick and cheap.

So how’s business? And if you’re on the client side, how’s budgets?  It seems our industry hasn’t seen the brunt of revenue devastation that many others have in the current economic slowdown. And as some measure of that, recent vendor and buyer surveys from Common Sense Advisory have provided more than anecdotal support for relative industry strength and confidence – even if vendors seem to be more optimistic than clients. On a personal level, this in turn feeds my confidence as a business owner to expand offerings, spend more on R&D, marketing, and (gasp), even hire a new employees.

On Internationalization

Internationalization, which is what my firm concentrates on, is actually a pretty good harbinger of the mood of the tech industry. That’s because internationalization requires a fresh and significant investment in future revenues, rather than maintaining localization on an existing product distribution release schedule. In fact, internationalization can stick out as a pretty large budget item at a time when tech companies have done well to minimize expenses and maximize profits on less to flat revenues. And while you never want to believe too deeply in generalized economic trajectories when getting specific about company forecasts, the investors’ expression “the trend is your friend” comes to mind. This means the onus has never been stronger on emphasizing the business case for internationalization and ultimately succeeding in new markets, while also finding new ways to bring together best of breed technology and people to make the work cost less with more predictability. It’s a great story, but the pressure remains on to tighten that triangle. Internationalization and Localization must compete with any number of other potential revenue opportunities, strategic initiatives and cost pressures.

I don’t want to imply that there isn’t a great deal of truth behind the good, quick or cheap triangle, but we are especially pressed to tighten the space between those choices. Whenever I hear someone use that saying, and it’s usually when someone is trying to sell me something, I’m always looking for a way out. How do we continuously find ways to produce better things, faster and for a lower cost? That’s what the promise of technology, combined with improved people processes and greater access to knowledge all have to offer. But particularly in the localization industry, at some point, it’s challenging to get around human processes that don’t scale so well, so we are back to good, quick, cheap – pick any two. Yet we all chip away at this, finding ways to move code or words along faster, better, cheaper. This is basic principle of technical advancement, but often in the throw of daily work, do we give ourselves the time to map out and affect these three competing attributes at once? When we talk with our managers and clients, are we given the latitude, time and budget to change processes and technologies even in the face of competing budget demands?

Tightening the Triangle

In many cases, the methods of tightening the triangle may not even reside within your firm, or your vendor’s firm. In fact, it may be healthier to look beyond any all-in-one offering. For instance, my firm has been partnering with many vendors right from its inception. We focus on providing internationalization tools and development services, a software development endeavor. Software development is a highly different skill set than managing words for localization, so a natural partnership opportunity arises. We also just began a partnership with a company with a product that supports internationalized documentation writing. That’s a natural fit that only benefits customers. So it makes sense to partner companies, and then go one step further, integrating processes and services together for an outcome that reduces the size of the triangle. Note that I’m not just referring about trading logo’s on websites, which is partnering in name only.

Exports to from Germany to China are up by almost 60% this year. No other segment of German foreign trade is growing as quickly. It follows that this kind of economic relationship ties nations, politics, workforces, just as much as goods and services. We are seeing the triangle getting smaller in action.

Though China rightfully gets lots of press, there are other places having very exciting growing trends. In fact, the fastest forecasted economic GDP growth rate for 2010 is actually from Qatar (16.4% – EconomyWatch.com).  2010 to 2020 has been predicted to be the African decade, with rapid growth forecast for many nations on that continent. How will this affect our triangle and our industry? Probably quite nicely!

There Will Be Winners and Losers

But there’s more to this equation. With these trends for global markets gaining purchasing power, there is also ample opportunity for the flow of technology to go the other way. All that market diversity, along with developing labor shakes things up. One would hope that the opportunities make up for the commercial pricing stress that could accompany expansion, but there will be winners and losers.  Additionally, we can expect new opportunities from untraditional channels. For example, we currently have a new client which is essentially a financial group that purchased Chinese technology and is remarketing it elsewhere. In this case, they are not considering entering the US market just yet, but starting in places like India where competition is not so dense. So they are buying good technology for less money, to sell to new markets with lower barriers to entry. I’d call that a creative way to tighten the triangle.

About the Author

Adam Asnes is President and CEO at Lingoport and enjoys investigating how globalization technology affects businesses expanding their worldwide reach. Adam is a sought after speaker at industry events and a columnist on globalization technology as it affects businesses expanding their worldwide reach. He often writes articles for localization, internationalization and globalization industry publications and enjoys cycling and Colorado’s Rocky Mountains; he can be reached by clicking here.

Lingoport’s Internationalization (I18n) and Localization (L10n) Tools and Consulting Solutions

Founded in 2001, Lingoport provides extensive software localization and internationalization consulting services. Lingoport’s Globalyzer software, a market leading software internationalization tool, helps entire enterprises and development teams to effectively internationalize existing and newly developed source code and to prepare their applications for localization.

For more information on how Lingoport can assist you with all of your internationalization and localization needs, please contact us at info@lingoport.com, call 303.444.8020, or complete the quote request form.

Together, Lingoport, acrolinx, Clay Tablet, Milengo and Asia Online showed how advanced, modular localization technology addresses the challenges faced when launching products or services to international markets in multiple languages.

Attendees were not only able to learn the key considerations when taking an international product from design to launch through, Internationalization, Information Authoring, Content Management, and Localization and Translation Automation but also learned how this is achievable quickly, and with fewer resources, while maintaining a consistent brand and user experience that builds value, saves time and reduces costs.

Simply click the below videos to view the sessions again in full length. The links to the presentations in PDF format can be found right below the videos.

Machine Translation Technology Integration by Kirti Vashee of Asia Online
A leader in Translation Technology shows how Machine Translation can make a huge impact on localization productivity delivering more words, faster and at a lower average cost.

You’ll learn:

• How the real time content model is set to change the localization landscape and how MT is poised to address this challenge.
• How MT can enable new kinds of projects never considered before, including those with millions of words.
• How large volume MT projects can facilitate rapid market expansion

Download Kirti’s Machine Translation Technology Integration Presentation in PDF format

Software Internationalization Best Practices by Adam Asnes of Lingoport
A leader in software internationalization solutions introduces the challenge of taking a complex software/hardware product to market in multiple languages. Lingoport will show how internationalization at the earliest stages of product design results in gains in efficiency and cost reductions further down the localization value chain.

You’ll learn:

• How to make your software work in all languages
• Why translation is crucial to sales success
• How internationalization drives efficiency in the localization value chain

Download Adam’s Internationalization Presentation in PDF format.

Information Quality Management Solutions by Kent Taylor of acrolinx
The world’s leading provider of Information Quality Management Solutions will show how to deliver quality product and technical information faster and for less money, despite time-to-market pressures, insufficient editing staff, and rapidly changing technology.

You’ll learn:

• How to save 15% – 25% on translation costs with quality source content
• What you need to know to improve your processes today
• Quality Management in the Information Development Environment

Download Kent’s Information Quality Management Solutions Presentation in PDF format

Content Management, Customer Relationship Management and Product Information Management System Integration by Robinson Kelly of Clay Tablet
A leader in localization efficiency solutions shows how automated translation processes make it simple to deliver product support and technical content from any Content Management, Customer Relationship Management or Product Information Management system and deliver significant reductions in localization costs and time to market.

You’ll learn:

• How Business Information Systems can be leveraged to deliver multilingual content.
• How sending content for translation is easy and hassle free
• How an automated workflow improves time to market and reduces costs when launching international products.

Download Robinson’s Content Management, Customer Relationship Management and Product Information Management System Integration Presentation in PDF format.

Localization and Translation Best Practices by Adam Blau of Milengo
A global provider of language services to Fortune 500 companies shows how multi-language vendors blend advanced localization workflows and technology to deliver multi-language translations quicker and, at a lower cost.

You’ll learn:

• How rapid market expansion requires rapid translation results
• Why human translation is important and the areas it really makes a difference
• How machines and humans can work together to tackle large volume multi language projects

Download Adam’s Localization and Translation Best Practices Presentation in PDF format.

Speakers

Adam Blau
Rebellion Leader at Milengo

Adam Blau joined Milengo during its conceptual phase, assisting with the research and development of the company’s localization alliance model. Adam is now responsible for managing milengo’s sales and marketing activities in North America and Europe, helping companies take advantage of the alliance structure in their localization planning. A native of San Francisco, California, he has lived in Berlin, Germany, for the past four years and recently relocated back to the Washington, DC. area.

Kent Taylor
General Manager at acrolinx

Kent Taylor defines himself as a Recovering Pubs Director and a 30-year enterprise publishing veteran, experienced in all aspects of information development and delivery, with a strong focus on people, process, technology, and quality. And, he is always seeking the Holy Grail: cost, quality, and timeliness – all at the same time!

Kirti Vashee
Vice President of Enterprise Translation Sales at Asia Online

Kirti Vashee is a seasoned sales and marketing executive of technology products who has built a reputation as an evangelist for SMT technology. He has been a prominent and accomplished speaker on automated translation technology in a variety of localization and globalization technology focused conferences around the world.

Robinson Kelly
CEO & Founder of Clay Tablet Technologies

Robinson is a technology entrepreneur and business start-up veteran. Clay Tablet is the fourth start-up technology company he’s been involved with over the past 15 years, including, working in Silicon Valley launching a content management firm. Robinson is now responsible for the sustained growth of the company by driving strategy, managing major partnerships, setting goals and directing the team.

Adam Asnes
President & CEO of Lingoport

Adam Asnes founded Lingoport in 2001 after seeing firsthand that the niche for software globalization engineering products and services was underserved in the localization industry. Lingoport helps globally focused technology companies adapt their software for worldwide markets with expert internationalization and localization consulting and Globalyzer software. Globalyzer, a market leading software internationalization tool, helps entire enterprises and development teams to effectively internationalize existing and newly developed source code and to prepare their applications for localization.

Canada represents one of the most accessible opportunities to test the waters of global expansion for companies which are new to adapting their software for worldwide customers. As I’ve written in nearly every one of these columns, internationalization and ultimately localization is driven first by business needs, partners, strategies and partners. That said, the bulk of this particular article takes a U.S.-centric view of software adaptation for Canada, particularly for companies new to globalization.

Business Case

From a U.S. perspective, there’s little barrier to doing business in Canada. After all, we share time zones, language and even phone number formatting. You can get there easily. Often, as in the case of my own firm, you end up selling there without even making a specific effort. Some 34 million people live in Canada (less than the population of California), however, most people live within driving distance of the U.S. border – and yes it’s a long border. In general, Canadians are quite informed regarding US culture and current events, though they are quite proud of their own economic strength and differences. They are also culturally committed to bilingualism. Personally, as a former New Yorker, about the only drawback to Canada is that they don’t jay walk – even when nobody is around to know, and everyone is so polite.  But I digress.

Most companies that my firm has supported for internationalization went to Canada for specific market- partner reasons. They had a client, whether internal or external, needing product adaptation including Canadian French. Clients who adapt their software for “deal-based” reasons, rather than part of a broad global marketing initiative usually have different needs-drivers reflected in deadlines, resources and scope. This can affect the balance of immediacy, costs and completeness.

Now, let me make it clear that I’m not writing that you absolutely have to provide French support for your software or site if you’re doing business in Canada. Note that I’m purposely not citing any specific Canadian law regarding bilingualism, as I’ve seen what has worked in practice. In that respect, it’s just like any other locale where you make a decision to localize based on business requirements. However, if you’re going to sell to the Canadian government, or sell broadly in Quebec, or if your business partner/customer is using your product to do the same, then Canada is the perfect market to get started with on your internationalization efforts.

A funny occurrence is that at my company, we’ve even worked with Canadian firms that went through the effort of releasing and building their customer base, using English only, and then needed help as their business opportunities expanded to require French Canadian support.

Internationalization

As your Canadian opportunities require, you may indeed need to adapt your product to better support clientele. Support for Canada is similar to any multiple locale adaptation, in that you would internationalize by adding a locale framework for the interface, various cultural formats (i.e. postal code sorting rather than zip codes), data input, database adaptations, business logic as needed (i.e. VAT, shipping differences, and the like). But even string externalization can have its multiple steps and processes to be successful. Here’s a summary of basic internationalization tasks:

• Design – establish requirements, locale selection and string externalization framework. Plan changes to the database schema.
• Implement String Externalization/Locale Framework – string externalization doesn’t just happen by itself. You have to create the framework so it uses your programming language convention and works for your current and future locale support needs.
• String Identification – here’s where a tool like Globalyzer, a leading internationalization tool,  really helps. Finding and isolating user-facing strings buried in large amounts of code, differentiated from programmatic elements like database calls, debug statements and variable arguments is otherwise pretty time consuming. The traditional approach is to write a few scripts and go through page by page and then clean up during testing. At best this is an error prone path. At its worst, it’s a never complete effort that drags on and on. So you’ll want to find the strings, see them in context and take action.
• String Externalization – Once identified, you’ll need to remove strings from within your source code, and place them in a resource file appropriate for your programming language and application. Each string has a call, plus a unique ID (usually a number), that will retrieve the string appropriate to the locale when the program is run. It’s a bit of a bookkeeping problem, and though many IDE’s will provide one by one string externalization support, Globalyzer helps this go lots faster by letting you perform batch string externalization operations, once the strings have been identified and reviewed.
• Formatting Changes – You can get away with quite a bit, getting ready for Canada. You’ll need to support postal codes as opposed to zip codes and any changes to processing them. But you can get away with US date time formatting of month/day/year if necessary.
• Database Changes – Chances are good that if you are using a modern commercial database, even with the default setup, you have support for ISO-Latin 1 characters, which of course handle English, French and other Western European languages. Still, you’ll need to adapt your schema to support multiple locales. Note that you will not need Unicode for Canada, but if you can swing it, and your code base technologies are Unicode friendly, then it’s a worthwhile consideration if you have further global release aspirations. Most don’t until they have to.
• String Refactoring – inevitably, a percentage of your strings will be concatenated, or broken into sections and built with programming logic. As word orders and sentence structure will change depending upon language, these strings will need to be refactored. This inevitably takes extra time. Again, string reports tend to help find these faster than combing through code manually or through retroactive testing.
• Layout Issue Correction – Chances are also good that you’ll need to make layout corrections as strings expand to support language changes. If you are unlucky enough to be concerned that your application supports ASCII characters only, you’ll need to find the various bottlenecks for ISO-Latin characters so that you don’t have problems with extended characters such as accents.
• Testing – consider how long it takes to test your product for a major release, and then add time for including systematic functional testing using pseudo-localization for functional issues, and linguistic testing for context accuracy. You could write a whole article on the relationship of these two alone. For more information, see last issue’s column on sim-ship across locales.

The trap in all this is that some companies make first efforts with a highly limited understanding of the scope of how this changes their application. Just in the last week, I started a conversation with a new client who only saw this effort as a string externalization exercise and literally was measuring costs per string, rather than the full picture. String handling represents the bulk of the visible effort, but without attention to the other processes, you’ll get something that at best works awkwardly. I consider that an educational opportunity, but I’ve also seen this limited understanding all too often exhibited by localization firms who should know better. Not introducing a more complete scope may give a client the minimum information they want quoted, but it places a successful implementation experience in real jeopardy.

When you add all these tasks together, internationalization and then localization, even when only considered for Canadian requirements, is still a significant product development undertaking. It will require expertise, proper forward looking product development planning and a level of reconcilability with other parallel product feature developments. For all the reasons mentioned in prior articles, including new testing criteria and objectification of locale, internationalization will make your product better and more adaptable if done right.

About the Author

Adam Asnes is President and CEO at Lingoport and enjoys investigating how globalization technology affects businesses expanding their worldwide reach. Adam is a sought after speaker at industry events and a columnist on globalization technology as it affects businesses expanding their worldwide reach. He often writes articles for localization, internationalization and globalization industry publications and enjoys cycling and Colorado’s Rocky Mountains; he can be reached by clicking here.

Lingoport’s Internationalization (I18n) and Localization (L10n) Tools and Consulting Solutions

Founded in 2001, Lingoport provides extensive software localization and internationalization consulting services. Lingoport’s Globalyzer software, a market leading software internationalization tool, helps entire enterprises and development teams to effectively internationalize existing and newly developed source code and to prepare their applications for localization.

For more information on how Lingoport can assist you with all of your internationalization and localization needs, please contact us at info@lingoport.com, call 303.444.8020, or complete the quote request form.

The subject of managing releases over worldwide markets can be a contentious one, with pros and cons on either side of business and development cases. The concept of simship is that if you are releasing your product to worldwide markets, you do it all at once rather than first releasing to your home market and then following with localized versions later. I can’t say that any one approach is right for all organizations, business situations and products, but I can share with you some of the organizational, procedural and business issues that contribute to successful simship global releases.

When a company commits to product releases that serve a worldwide customer base, there’s a long shadow cast on revenue, marketing, sales teams and of course development practices and testing. It’s a challenging logistical undertaking to release software products in multiple markets, requiring well-integrated planning and practices. It’s no wonder simship is viewed alternatively as difficult and impractical to the best thing a company can do. Let’s consider a few of the issues within any organization, starting with the business case.

Internationalization and localization are always in pursuit of a business case, and one exists both for and against simship. That said, the business cases tend to vary based on the global perspective and maturity of the company. The case for simship is strongest among experienced global companies. Their revenues are already global, so delaying releases for localized versions only serves to delay resulting new release revenues. There may be good reason for adding secondary tiers for some local release schedules, but products really should be internationalized, with a clear path for localization and testing within the development path. In practice this isn’t the reality, but there’s quite a bit of agreement and successful data on the business case existing for simship with this class of company.

When companies are relatively new to global markets, they generally tend to put less of an emphasis on simship with new releases, and more of an emphasis on market or business agreements as drivers for their efforts. Perhaps they have a new customer or distributor that must have a localized version. In that case, synchronizing new version development with localization is usually—but not always—an afterthought. This is because the company sees its prime revenues being driven by current product customers. New releases boost sales, renewals and competition, so that connection is strongest where the current customers are. We’d still argue that even under these circumstances, simship should not be pushed aside, as there are gains to be made both for revenues and operations.

Time and Revenue Projections

Attached to initial time to release and revenue opportunities are quarterly and annual growth numbers. If a product is expected to grow sales by percentages outlined and expected in a marketing plan over months, quarters and years, significant delays in turn make those projections difficult, if not impossible, to meet. Delays add up to real dollars. Now let’s leave the business case behind and look at software development organizations. It is extremely common among both development and localization teams to view localization as a tail-end process. But this is a critically limiting perception if your company is committing itself to serve global customers. Practically, a company shouldn’t build a product with a requirement as major as supporting multiple locales as a tail-end process. Even in cases where legacy code is now being first internationalized for global customers, once that adaptation is complete, from then on localization should be included as an expected part of the development process. That means including requirements for planning, architecture, development implementation, testing and release.

I asked my internationalization colleague Tex Texin to add some words about this. He seconded that as with many other aspects of globalizing applications, development organizations tend to see just the work and delay to releasing their product and not the benefits. And although we work to plan to minimize the pain, there is cost to achieving simship. However, exercising the localized versions often uncovers critical problems in the product core that can require urgent updates, recalls or even the creation of specialized tools to repair customer data in the field. In that context, simship is not only a requirement to be in the international markets and significantly enhance revenue, but is an important part of product testing preventing problems that are costly to repair and damaging to both reputation and future domestic sales.

Tactics

Simship nearly always seems to be the outcome of an internationalization implementation. So, we have some experience working with legacy code that we are internationalizing and then merging with concurrent new development, building localization proactively into the process.

We find and work with the localizable content embedded in the code first. We gain a clear estimate of localization costs by examining those strings, even while they are still embedded in the code using static source analysis. That’s important because it allows the budget and financing mechanisms of an organization more time to accurately fund the localization. Then we systematically provide externalized strings for localization as we go along in the project, rather than waiting until the end. We also perform static analysis on concurrent new feature development so that when we merge legacy and new code, we minimize the risk of expensive surprises. We build functional internationalization and localization test cases and execute both. The internationalization functional testing can be performed by testers regardless of linguistic proficiency. However, because we have been localizing all along, we are also quickly ready for linguistic testing. The combined processes are extremely effective in finding both functional and linguistic defects that may have passed through if performed as an afterthought.

Agile Development: It’s one thing to talk about including localization into your internationalization and development process on large-scale efforts, but what about smaller scale and rapid agile releases? Turns out it’s really no different. I talked to Mike McKenna, globalization manager at Yahoo!, to get some perspective. An extreme example is the release cycles for Flickr, Yahoo!’s photo sharing social network. Flickr sometimes rolls out four to six releases per day, holding the expectation that developers can get immediate access to translations they may need, likely to be small UI changes. Then they pride themselves with directly connecting their developers to users, without intermediaries, to fix issues that may arise from localization or functional changes.

Yahoo! has other software, such as its Open Strategy Platform or Yahoo! Application Platform, which typically have six-week release cycles. In this case, there is a UI freeze before the release sprint so that localization can be integrated into the final release sprint. Developers work with their localization managers and ensure any last-minute tweaks that may become necessary to the UI during the release sprint are well coordinated.

Security: Let’s go back using our timetunnel to the 1990s: Windows 95 was first released in August 1995, its first service pack was released in February 1996 and the second pack in 1998. The localized versions were always lagging behind: Microsoft first released the “Enabled“ version, which was not localized but could run software in your language. A few months later, Microsoft released the localized version. Today, Microsoft and other companies release security patches on a monthly basis if not on a weekly basis. Can you imagine releasing the patch in North America first and only a few months later in the rest of the world? Simship enables the release of security patches and other critical patches on a timely basis to all markets and prevents security glitches.

Internationalization as Enabler

The success of localization and the ability to coordinate simship processes are directly dependent upon the quality of a product’s internationalization as well as the development team’s ongoing internationalization practices. Internationalization is the software development enabler, and without it or without a consistent internationalization benchmark, localization and particularly simship get broken. As the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. Simship takes a little more planning, time, tools and coordination, but it’s hardly an onerous process. Like a lot of things, your organization has to be aware of the benefits and just do it. Then the actual doing is clearly achievable.

About the Author

Adam Asnes is President and CEO at Lingoport and enjoys investigating how globalization technology affects businesses expanding their worldwide reach. Adam is a sought after speaker at industry events and a columnist on globalization technology as it affects businesses expanding their worldwide reach. He often writes articles for localization, internationalization and globalization industry publications and enjoys cycling and Colorado’s Rocky Mountains; he can be reached by clicking here.

Lingoport’s Internationalization (I18n) and Localization (L10n) Tools and Consulting Solutions

Founded in 2001, Lingoport provides extensive software localization and internationalization consulting services. Lingoport’s Globalyzer software, a market leading software internationalization tool, helps entire enterprises and development teams to effectively internationalize existing and newly developed source code and to prepare their applications for localization.

For more information on how Lingoport can assist you with all of your internationalization and localization needs, please contact us at info@lingoport.com, call 303.444.8020, or complete the quote request form.

If you’re considering internationalizing a large and complex software product, there’s one thing you should be prepared for: it’s expensive. There’s just no way around it if you want an application that properly presents, inputs, transforms and reports complex data. I’m talking about applications measured in the hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code. Seriously, you’re just not going to internationalize a sizeable application that you’ve taken years to develop with money just laying around – unless you have a lot of money laying around, which is pretty rare these days. But before we consider what to do about it, let’s consider the main reasons why you may need to internationalize:

Survival –

Your customers are increasingly global, and perhaps they use your product to reach their customers. If you’re not internationalized, you’re limiting their business. The competition and your customers will know this and will eventually eat your company alive. You’d better start finding some money.

A Sale –

There is nothing like an important customer to get an initiative moving. If this sale funds the internationalization effort, it makes things easier, though there will be commitment that will extend beyond any one customer. I’ve written before how changing your encoding will change your company. But if this sale doesn’t pay for the effort, corporate initiative will be needed.

Your company is global –

Perhaps your company is a global brand and you’ve quickly developed or acquired a product that isn’t internationalized. In this case, the decision to internationalize is usually simple. You do it because you already have a global reputation, sales and distribution. If you have to justify ROI, somebody is missing the point, there’s a temporary issue or the product isn’t showing promise.

Strategic Initiative –

This article isn’t going to be about all the strategic benefits of growing global revenues with products that leverage themselves worldwide, because you know all about that, right? But acting on strategy takes foresight, money, expertise and perseverance.

If you have any of the above situations except budget, this article is especially for you.

I’ll repeat a situation I’ve seen many times. My firm, Lingoport, will be called upon for initial consulting as a company is considering internationalization in reaction to a declared strategic objective to gain business outside a home market. They usually have one or two customers asking for just that, but perhaps there isn’t enough initial interest to finance the necessary development and localization. We go back and perform static analysis on the code using our Globalyzer software, counting the embedded strings, locale-limiting methods/functions/classes and programming patterns that will need attention and refactoring, combined with architectural changes to support locale and changes in processing.

Even with automating tasks for batch efforts like string externalization (after analysis), you still have design, engineering and testing cycles that add up to significant expense. At this point we find out just how strong corporate global resolve sits. And in some cases that resolve is just not quite ready. It’s not a lost cause by any means. In fact, almost always, it’s just a matter of time and resources and most come around in future quarters or fiscal years. But there lies the gap for development managers.

Rarely do developers internationalize software just because it would be cool. You do see that kind of initiative for new features, where a developer might get an idea, work on it during odd or even personal time, and voila, present it to his or her company peers. I have yet to see that happen regarding internationalization (write me if you see otherwise). Still, developers and management often know the need to internationalize is there; ready to become a firm requirement any quarter now. They can go on continuing to develop new features and update current code and not go near internationalization, but actually increasing the scope of the internationalization effort as they grow the code base. Or they can take some simple steps to get ready. To use an expression, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” Here’s a brief list of what you can do:

• Gather requirements – new locale requirements will go much further than what languages will need to be supported. An architect can be tasked with learning about issues like character encoding and locale frameworks. A product marketing person can learn a bit about use cases and business logic that may alter how the product behaves in new countries. It is all too easy to underestimate the requirements phase. Locale behavior will involve quite a bit more than just string externalization. Start tallying and recording what is found in a centrally available resource, like the company wiki for all to build upon and learn about.
• Prototype a string retrieval method. Learn about resource files and string ID’s and how to make them work. Again, list your results in the company wiki.
• Do a little reading about Unicode and its various encodings, along with appropriate technologies for their use. It’s not enough to commit to using Unicode. You have to gain some understanding of just what that means.
• Consider your database schema and how that might change for locale support along with likely changes to character encoding.
• Consider any third party components or open source you use within your application. Start inquiring about their internationalization support.
• Consider internationalizing a pilot effort or component of your software if your product architecture will permit it. There’s nothing like learning by doing. And if you decide to take a somewhat different approach later, it probably won’t be too difficult to alter what you’ve already done.
• Refine your planning – as you learn more, your planning efforts are likely to get clearer. As plans get clearer, they seem less risky and large. You’ll be in a better position to defend expected costs, resources and schedules.
• Consider application logic. Does your software manage a process that is performed differently around the world?
• Talk with experts – It’s not prudent to try and reinvent the internationalization process. An experience expert, who’s really been through multiple implementations rather than just advising, can get you prepared faster and cheaper than the time it will take using your internal developers. I’ve seen companies create their own proprietary approaches that ultimately get in the way of a successful implementation. Initial consultation shouldn’t be a budget buster. Even so there are free internationalization webinars (we give them and others do too) and excellent conferences available (i.e. Worldware and the Unicode Conferences).
• Start measuring toward your expected outcome – If you establish internationalization development practices and measure benchmarks, you are likely to see improvements to new development without significant cost in time and money. Static analysis tools like Globalyzer create a systematic approach, but if there’s no budget, then a simple and clear inclusion of practices and expectations can go a long way.

If you do at least some of this prior to any funded but highly likely internationalization requirement, you’ll be a tremendous asset to your firm’s globalization efforts. And globalization might just be one of the more significant and company-making undertakings that your firm can embark upon.

Innovation promises great leaps forward. It offers hopeful and seemingly wondrous shortcuts and economies to everything it touches. It’s a new way, maybe audaciously conceived, and often tricky to execute. It’s also a fundamental pedestal for all we do. And many of us, if we are perseverant and lucky, are actually in the business of being innovative. But innovation always faces initial rejection. It’s just part of the deal.

There’s the promise of dramatic improvement, the skepticism, disappointment and persistence that we find so addicting. So I think it’s worth the time dissecting that process a bit, so we can all benefit a bit more from understanding the inventor, while bringing ourselves forward in ways we can apply to our professional and personal lives.

Great Leaps and Incremental Improvements

I recently read an article that proclaimed a requirement to call something an innovation is a 10x improvement in a process, expense or service. I rather like the idea of putting a numerical value on innovation, as it sets a target standard to be aiming for. I can ask, does my product provide that 10x improvement? That’s a demanding figure! However I don’t think you can discount innovation that isn’t as startling.

Some innovations, think of the printing press and more recently the internet, offer astronomical gains in productivity and information access across society. Going to the library to research has become a quaint activity, with power usurped from librarians everywhere. The internet becomes our personal assistant, advertising vehicle and even a translator. That doesn’t mean incremental improvements aren’t important either. Actually, I think the two are implicitly married, and that one doesn’t persist towards adoption without the other. Broadly applied innovation has an ecosystem of technologies, users and materials. For example, improvements in virus protection probably don’t have a 10x multiplier on internet use, but they do have a cumulative effect on browsing behavior of the people who adapt that protection. Think of the distinction in terms of game changing, and solving serious pitfalls. Both are important to success and adaptation.

Now it also seems that with innovation, you also necessarily encounter a sociological refusal that I’m saying you must overcome to be optimally successful. An example from my mid 90’s past we’d consider small minded now is needing to lobby a particular VP to grant internet access to sales people to help them research customers sites. The establishment fear was that people would spend all day surfing inappropriate sites that would take away from productivity. I can’t imagine an information technology company in that science-focused business applying that same reasoning any longer.

People, particularly from my generation or older, discount social media and blogging, but it’s actually a fairly effective and potent form of circulating news – yes many may not want all the minutia that comes with it, but it can be used quite powerfully and personally when used well.

In a more pedestrian example, I often hear about how code analysis tools won’t work, particularly applied to internationalization, even when there’s apparent proof in project and customer success that they do. I consider it a badge of honor that a leading localization company featured in their blog how internationalization tools are a myth. They all but called out my company’s product by name.  Yet an open mind and some actual research or even a phone call would have shown more of an embrace of the possibility of improvements that actually help the whole industry. People are all too happy to kill off innovation without a serious thought or investigation based on their experiences in the past. In other words, past attempts were unsuccessful before, so we’ll assume nothing could have changed. The blog post even sited products that have been extinct for years as evidence. Small example but this is how reactionary thinking plays out in management efforts that can potentially be damaging in an information industry routed in advancing technologies and development methods.

Where Innovation Comes From

I haven’t noticed a clear path to an innovation process, but what I do know is that ideas are common, good ideas are rare and good ideas followed with action are rarer still. A dynamic individual may have or come across what many would feel is a good idea, about 4 to 8 times per year – some people much more, some less. Ideas are always fun and exciting to me, but I confess to only following up on a few. The rest of creativity goes into tweaking current projects, or reading and learning and bringing those ideas into everyday activities.

Since there isn’t really any value in a creative or innovative idea without follow-through, there is nothing wrong and everything to gain by running with someone else’s innovative idea or improvement. You just have to keep an open mind to where it may come from.

Big ideas can come from the top down or bottom up. But incremental improvements more typically come from your everyday users or developers living with a product every day.

For instance, an ongoing challenge for us in our Globalyzer product, is that when our clients first apply it to perform static analysis on their code, they often end up with what we refer to as false positive results. That is, the product will flag internationalization errors, and in particular embedded strings, which may be programmatic elements such as debug statements or database queries. We developed rules based filters and a back end database to minimize, catch and tag them, but they typically need some adaptation and customization for each code base. That’s fine and to be expected and managed, and even a strength of the system, but what if there was another way?

And in fact a Jr. Programmer/intern working at my company doing a lot of code scanning for service projects made a simple remark, “what if we compared those strings to an actual dictionary? That would tell us quite a bit about the nature of the string just based on content, rather than programmatic rules.” It was a very good idea and one of our architects adapted it to make it real. By the time you are reading this, this improvement will have been released in our software. The young programmer is back in school and has moved on, but his good idea is about to become a real part of our product.

Innovation Devalues Everything it Touches

By its very nature, innovation puts either a person or process out of work. It wouldn’t be worth anything if it didn’t make someone more productive with less. At the same time, the first rounds of innovation are typically full of pitfalls that need to be overcome.

The immediate case that comes to mind is the current brouhaha over crowdsourcing. In case you haven’t attended LocalizationWorld,  read up on industry happenings, or participated in numerous LinkedIn discussions, Crowdsourcing is either a great evil or the most innovative thing that’s happened in our industry in a while, or something in between. There are complaints about the very concept, the devaluing of translator expertise and what some people feel is an inferior end result produced by enthusiastic, but naive, volunteers willing to work for accolades alone. Others, notably at Facebook, feel it’s a process that results in faster, cheaper translations at a higher quality. It’s not hard to find evidence supporting both sides, and I suppose at the moment final judgment on immediate results may not be the relevant criteria. More likely the industry could potentially have something to gain using the technologies for rendering translations in context with application pages, rather than the contextless traditional table view. These tools can be applied to more traditional translation resources, while also gaining a better linguistic review platform and buy-in from in-country clients and employees – who are after all, the real stakeholders and judges in a localization effort. But that’s just my understanding of it, and I may be overlooking something. Certainly there’s a long way to go, but I wouldn’t be caught on the side of belittling the persistent follow-through of dedicated people bringing ideas into reality and adding enhancements to overcome pitfalls.