[This is an archive of the original 1997 IMUG web page. Click here to return to the event archive index.]
The U.S. Department of Commerce's U.S. Commercial Service is committed to providing small- and medium-sized businesses the information and troubleshooting assistance they need to aggressively target international markets. The Commercial Service also provides advocacy support to medium and large companies through its worldwide network of more than 140 offices in 70-some countries, increasing the odds that U.S. companies win major contracts.
At the December 18 IMUG meeting, International Trade Specialist Jennifer Wickland from the San Jose Export Assistance Center will review the products and services available at low or no cost through the Commercial Service and through partner organizations and will help attendees leverage those services to full advantage.
Full-text search and retrieval are tightly associated with lingustics, such as stemming rules and thesauras. Unicode introduces new challenges of multilingual support in text search and retrieval.
This presentation discusses technical issues in multilingual search and retrieval, and how Unicode support and multilingual search and retrieval fit into the internationalization and localization architecture in Verity's search platform.
Roland Wang is a senior internationalization engineer in the kernel group at Verity, primarily working on its internationalization and localization projects. He also works on some parts of the search engine kernel. Prior to Verity, he worked on a wide variety of software internationalization and localization projects for 7 years at Oracle, Apple, and Sun. He holds an M.S. degree and a B.S. degree, both in computer science.
Several different character encoding methods are in use in the Korean computing industry, such as EUC (KS C 5601-1987), Common Johap (KS C 5601-1992), Old Johap (KS C 5601-1987-3), N-Byte Jahap, and ISO-2022-KR. In 1995, the Korean government announced a new standard, KS C 5700, which is based on Unicode 2.0/ISO 10646. This standard contains all characters of the previous charset encodings.
To supply the new standard charset, Solaris, Sun Microsystem's version of Unix, needs a new locale which enables to support Unicode on the Unix platform and the X Window System without breaking the compatibility with the existing environment, and also to support input/output methods for KS C 5700.
This presentation describes the design and implementation of the Unicode support in Korean Solaris 2.6 (Korean UTF-8 locale), and describes how it can integrate the existing data files of various encodings and applications into a new standard and the multiscript computing environment.
Chang Jung holds a BS degree in Computer Science from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. He worked seven years on Korean localization of Unix, X, and Motif at Hyundai Electronics, and has spent the last two years developing Korean Solaris 2.6 at Sun Microsystems, USA.
Apple has been heavily involved with the development of the Unicode character set from its inception and has maintained a commitment to provide Unicode support in its products. One area where this support has been conspicuously absent is within QuickDraw, the Macintosh's imaging system.
Unicode Imaging Services, to be released next year with the Allegro release of MacOS, remedies this problem. UIS represents new functionality added to QuickDraw to allow for the direct rendering of Unicode text.
The basic design of UIS will be discussed, as will its relationship to the Text Encoding Converter, QuickDraw GX, and other Apple technologies and its implications for the future of Unicode on the Macintosh.
John H. Jenkins is an engineer in Apple's International, Text, and Graphics group.
In this presentation, Emmanuel briefly reviews domestic software quality assurance procedures; he then discusses additional procedures that are available for testing internationalized and localized software. He will illustrate these procedures with examples from his recent work in testing such software for Apple's Newton group, Adobe, and Siebel Systems.
Emmanuel Uren, an Anglo-Maltese, attended Manchester, Yale and Stanford Universities, and has lived and worked in the UK, Quebec, Venezuela and Mexico as well the US. He is an independent consultant specializing in Software Quality Assurance, and Internationalization and Localization. He is the senior author of "Software Internationalization and Localization - An Introduction", published by Van Nostrand Reinhold, and has written for Multilingual Computing Magazine.
With the release of version 1.1, Java now has numerous new features of interest to anyone involved in multilingual computing. Glen Perkins (glen.perkins@nativeguide.com), a specialist in Asian-language Java development, will discuss and demonstrate the use of many of these new features.
All major independent software vendors realize the majority of their revenues from overseas sales. As the US market becomes more competitive and mature, more companies, no matter their size, will need to have their products engineered and translated to other languages. Currently, this process is very expensive, not just in terms of direct costs but also in delays to market and poor quality products. These indirect costs are more difficult to quantify but their impact on companies is many millions of dollars more than direct costs. In this talk we will examine possible solutions to the problems of internationalization and localization with an eye to reducing overall costs of this process.
Alex Pressman is President of Uniscape Inc. Located in Redwood Shores, CA, Uniscape serves independent software vendors who are looking to optimize their globalization processes, cut costs and reduce time to market. Uniscape's products and services provide a complete globalization process automation solution that increases revenues and decreases costs of getting their products to the world's markets.
Prior to founding Uniscape, Alex was a Senior Product Manager at Oracle where he was responsible for Oracle Translation Manager and the Developer/2000 integrated development environment code named Atlas. Prior to Oracle, Alex was a Localization Manager for Borland Latin America and International Project Manager for Borland C++, where he shipped more than 16 localized versions of Borland products worldwide.
Claris Corp. has released Japanese FileMaker Pro 3.0 last year. This is the first cross platform (Mac and Windows) version of FileMaker Pro localized into Japanese. The product hit the market with a big bang. FileMaker Pro 3.0-J is now the most popular database application on the Mac and the 2nd most popular database application on Windows in Japan.
Kenny Tung will discuss the development strategy used for the 3.0J cross platform release and give you a demo of the features in the Japanese product. Items include:
As part of the demo, Kenny will also give you a sneak preview of Chinese/Korean FileMaker Pro 3.0.
Kenny Tung (Kenny_Tung@Claris.com) is the development manager responsible for Asian versions of the FileMaker Pro in Claris Asia Language Group.
Yahoo! has now launched localized versions of its popular web guide in five countries: Canada, UK & Ireland, France, Germany and Japan. These sites provide users with access to local language content and information services. Yahoo! Japan is now the largest web site outside of North America. Yahoo! has taken strides to provide national users with a service that reflects their unique language and culture while maintaining the traditional Yahoo look and feel. This balance is maintained by product groups in the U.S. working in tandem with full product groups in the local countries. Maury will speak about the philosophy and design behind these sites. Randy will speak about the business relationships and how we go about selecting partners.
Maury Zeff, Senior Producer, heads up the product integration efforts in these new markets. In addition to his international responsibilities he established Yahooligans! as the leading directory for kids on the web.
Randy Salim, Director, International Business Development, is responsible for exploring opportunities for Yahoo! outside of Europe.
Apple's two most recent additions to its line of Language Kits are the Korean Language Kit and the Indian Language Kit.
In Fall 1996, Apple shipped the Korean Language Kit, a system level solution for multilingual computing in Korean. In February, Apple released the Indian Language Kit, a system level solution for multilingual computing in Hindi, Gujarati, and Punjabi. Apple engineers will demo and discuss these products and describe methods developers can use to take advantage of them.
Anne Ogborn is the engineering tech lead for language kits. Red Park is a software engineer for language kits.
Adobe FrameMaker has long been available in both European and Japanese versions, though the Japanese versions have only been available on Unix. In Fall of 1996, however, Adobe Systems shipped their first Macintosh version of FrameMaker localized into Japanese (FrameMaker 5.2J), using WorldScript II technology. Lee Richardson will discuss the development strategy used for the 5.2J Mac release, and cover ongoing technical issues in taking Asian features cross-platform. Items include:
As part of demoing FrameMaker 5.2J, Lee will also show a new set of Chinese and Korean PostScript fonts from Ken Lunde.
Lee Richardson (lhr@adobe.com) is the development manager responsible for Japanese features in the FrameMaker engineering group.
Magic Cap® is the operating system from General Magic that helped create the first generation of easy-to-use, economical portable communicating electronic devices. With the Rosemary release, Magic Cap has for the first time been internationalized and localized into Japanese. Tetsuo Seto and Norbert Lindenberg will demo the Japanese version and show you its user interface, text input, name handling and sorting, and support for Japanese standards. They will also explain the underlying internationalization architecture, its localizable services and the new text-object based APIs.
Tetsuo Seto (tetsuo_seto@genmagic.com) is the manager of the International Magic Cap group, Norbert Lindenberg the internationalization lead engineer for Magic Cap.
