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Oracle is faced with managing large-scale software development of internationalized and localizable internet-enabled products and websites and delivering them into more than 30 languages, while using their own technology and working towards a goal of saving 2 billion dollars in this fiscal year.
In this pragmatic talk, Ultan looks at some of the best practices to follow for scaleable, cost effective multilingual website and application service provider deployment and maintenance, as well as areas such as choosing a localization vendor for outsourcing, cutting through the dot com globalization hype, and circumnavigating internal political obstacles. Examples from Oracle Corporation will be used to illustrate.
Ultan Ó Broin is Senior Translation Program Manager, working with Oracle Corporation's Applications Division in Redwood Shores, CA. He has worked in the localization industry for over 10 years, first with Microsoft Corporation on the Windows, Word, and FoxPro products, and then with Oracle Corporation's Worldwide Product Translation Group on their Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management product suites.
Macromedia is an interesting company. They sell packaged software applications to other Web developers while running their own website, one of the 20 busiest in the world. And now they're moving into server-side applications, again both for their customers and for their own website.
Macromedia is an interesting place to see internationalization issues impacting (sometimes colliding with) a wide variety of software products and services.
Glen has a few comments, and a few (tentative) conclusions based on what's happening at Macromedia and elsewhere. Hopefully, this will lead into a discussion of others' experiences on the same front lines. Come share your thoughts.
Glen Perkins is the Globalization Architect at Macromedia, Inc., and was one of the original members of IMUG. A speaker of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (Mandarin), he has spent years trying to get linguistically lame software systems to do things they were never meant to do.
With over 10 million individuals getting online via their cell phone today, Japan has become a compelling market for U.S companies eager to learn from, and capitalize on, the wireless Internet market. Rika was in Japan during the time the wireless access reached critical mass, and witnessed first-hand the phenomenon that is forever changing the way people communicate and transact - for social, personal, and business purposes. She will give us the backdrop of the wireless developments revolutionizing her homeland, and address the issues arising around the programming standards as the world wireless market begins to converge on 3G, with Japan the first market to do so.
Ms. Nakazawa has been immersed in the Internet industry for over five years, with the past year as Online Marketing Director for the Japan operation of the Web Connection (TWC). She now is Business Development Liaison with TWC's San Francisco office, with the mandate to assist business in leveraging the power of online for their global market entry endeavors.
This talk will describe the challenges of web-based cross-platform multilingual text input across a large number of languages. Multi- lingual text input is distinct from localization and translation, with which it is often confused.
This talk will give an overview of some of the different ways of making web-based cross-platform multilingual text input possible. It will also discuss the various language families and the specific issues related to each language family. Other topics discussed include input mechanisms and keyboard layouts.
Syed Aamer Azam is CTO and VP Engineering at WordWalla, Inc., a firm that provides multlingual communication services.
A live technical demonstration of the Asian typographic features of Microsoft Office 2000 will be presented. Office 2000 provides a rich set of Unicode based tools targeted toward international developers, translators, technical writers, and other localization professionals. Because these tools use a multilingual user interface, English speakers, for example, can access these utilities with an English user interface operating on Asian text.
Particularly useful if you work with Asian or right-to-left languages will be demonstrations of:
As Mathematics alumnus of the University of Hawaii, Jim Turley began his Silicon Valley life at IBM as an Operating Systems Programmer with a secret specialty in Asian archeology. When he is not traveling to remote regions in South Western China in search of lost kingdoms, he can be found working for XA International, a Saratoga-based international engineering company. Jim speaks a few Asian languages himself, none of them well, and writes none at all.
Natural language processing software has been around for a long time, but it has never worked well because it has always tried to be everything to everybody. In contrast, Dejima's AASAP (Adaptive Agent Software Architecture Platform) focuses on narrower, context- sensitive applications. With a more restricted vocabulary, the cumbersome traditional monolithic grammar-based approaches are no longer necessary. Instead, AASAP is built using a Java multi-threaded agent-based system. This kind of distributed approach means that intelligence comes from both the configuration of the individual agents and how they are interconnected in the network. Avoiding traditional grammar rules and legacy NLP approaches also allows AASAP to be easily adapted to a variety of languages, grammatical structures, and character sets.
In this presentation, Mr. Ghenis will explain this innovative approach to understanding commands in multiple languages, including a demonstration of these capabilities.
Paul Ghenis has worked for many years on multilingual language processing, software localization, and localization toolkit development. He has worked at Xerox Artificial Intelligence Systems, at Sierra On-line, where he created the first semantic natural language interface for games to understand Japanese sentences, and he has been a localization manager and tool developer at AT&T, Systemlogic, IDOC, and Skysoft.
Windows CE (Compact Edition) is Microsoft's version of Win32 for hand-held, palm-sized, and automobile computers as well as for dedicated and embedded system use. Unlike many similar operating systems, Windows CE was born fully developed with respect to internationalization support. Its best known such feature is the use of Unicode as its character set, but most of the rest of the Win32 NLS API also carries over, albeit with some limitations. In this talk we combine presentation materials with demonstration programs to explore Windows CE with internationalization in mind.
Bill Hall has worked for many years as a developer and consultant on various Windows platforms including 16-bit Windows from 1.0 to 3.1, Windows 95/98, Windows NT, and Windows CE. Beginning in 1992 with his seminal articles on Windows National Language Support, he has worked in development and software internationalization at companies such as AT&T, Olivetti, Novell, Netcom, and most recently as Internationalization Director at SimulTrans. He presents often at international conferences such as Unicode and Win-Dev, and he has written articles for magazines such as Programmer's Journal, Microsoft Systems Journal, and Multilingual Computing. He also teaches an occasional internationalization course at the University of California's Santa Cruz Extension.
Globalization is more than just a buzzword to webmasters these days, as the focus of Internet marketing, e-business, and e-commerce shifts from a saturated U.S. market to the global economy. The flavor and functionality of websites must be retooled for overseas audiences, who crave content crafted for their specific market. How can a company centrally manage their brand and style, deliver consistent high-quality content and customer service, and still tailor their website to local needs? In this presentation we explore how several companies have built successful global server applications that deliver on the promise of "GRL/P" (global, regional, local, and personalized) content. Some of the issues discussed will include:
Addison Phillips is Senior Globalization Consultant at GlobalSight Corporation, the developer of software solutions for accelerating global e-business. He has over eight years of experience in the localization and internationalization industry, working with customers such as AT&T, Lucent, SGI, Kodak, HP, Avid, IBM, and GE to solve their globalization problems.
HTML has character set limitations which require planning and workarounds to produce a properly internationalized interface. Designers must consider that the server has limited knowledge of client preferences, and so must provide explicit information from the user interface. Learn about CGI strengths and weaknesses, problem areas in HTML, and ways to work around the quirks of a Web interface.
Andrea Vine has been internationalizing and localizing software for 10 years, working with large companies such as Xerox and Computer Associates, as well as a number of smaller firms. Her specialty is internationalized design for software applications. In the past she has worked on products such as e-commerce applications, spreadsheets, project planners, communications interfaces, network servers, and word processors. She has also written some articles on internationalization for Multilingual Computing. She is currently at Sun Microsystems, working on messaging servers and corporate internationalization strategy.
This talk describes electronic commerce and online payment trends, here in the US and internationally.
Commerce can be defined simply as the buying and selling of goods and services - and, somewhere along the way, sellers want a way to get paid. In many ways, all the things that make up a good e-commerce site are to support the site (merchant) receiving some form of payment in the end.
This talk will give a quick overview of some of the trends and statistics in e-commerce and then delve into online payment - the backbone of e-commerce. We'll talk about some of the different ways to pay for goods and services in the online world, how they may differ from the physical world, and some of the ways a site can enable payment on their websites.
Mimi Obinata is the Product Manager for Payment Services at CyberSource Corporation. Before joining CyberSource, she was the product manager for Solaris International at Sun Microsystems. She holds an MBA and a BA in Computer Science.
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