Keep Score of Your Internationalization Efforts

Those in the localization industry have become more aware of the importance of internationalization as a part of their overall globalization efforts. Software internationalization in particular can be difficult to articulate and efforts can be prone to errors without the proper help.

Lingoport has come across a number of companies that have issues with tracking the status of their internationalization efforts, resulting in hindered global development cycles. A delay in internationalization is compounded to further delays down the road in releasing products in new locales. Such delays cost companies in terms of their bottom line.

To help businesses fight this problem, Lingoport has developed a score card mechanism within Globalyzer to help development teams find, fix and monitor internationalization issues. The score card can be tailored to the specific needs of each development team and be used in a number of programming languages.

Join us for a free webinar on Thursday, June 16 at 10am EDT (3pm GMT) and 2pm EDT as Adam Asnes and Olivier Libouban of Lingoport review the i18n score card specifics and discuss:

• The Internationalization Score Card setup and analyst input.
• Using Globalyzer in the Internationalization Score Card.
• The Internationalization Score Card utilities.
• A workflow to integrate the Internationalization Score Card in a continuous integration environment, and more.

The webinar targets technical managers, software engineers, test engineering managers, QA managers, internationalization and localization managers, and anyone facing ongoing software globalization and internationalization challenges.

Registration is free and is available at:

• 10am EDT: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/908953161
• 2pm EDT: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/820364216

This webinar was inspired by a discussion at last March’s Worldware Conference where Adobe, Autodesk and Yahoo! held a panel on how they are tackling the problem of measuring globalization compliance. The video and description are viewable at http://i18nblog.com/2011/03/28/worldware-presentation-i18n-assessments/

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The Need for Internationalization (i18n) in Administrative Solutions: A Case in Point with Region Centre

By Olivier Libouban, Software Project Manager at Lingoport.

A Region is an administrative layer in France, with elected officials, getting tax Euros, and setting up programs and initiatives for the citizens. Part of the responsibility of any region is also to provide software solutions to the citizens. Part of the responsibility of any region is also to provide software solutions to the citizens, with significant budgets : the IT department of any Region manages bids, responses, and supervises the implementation of the solutions.

A case in point for “Region Centre”, situated close south west of Paris, is the need for an e-learning platform, dealing amongst other things with budgets, financial institutions, training institutions and citizens able to register and follow classes, either on-site or on-line. The request for proposal of such programs is sent by the IT department and gives the context, the functional needs, and the requirements at large for this type of program, including strategic technologies, such as Portal by a specific vendor. The entire platform may be composed of a large number of software components, in this case ranging from the software infrastructure pieces, such as Web application server, LDAP, and databases, to specific functional components, such as an e-learning tool to be integrated in the overall software and hardware platform.

The IT department oversees the responses to the request, and solutions which do not play in a French locale cannot be accepted. All components must behave and interact with each other, be it in terms of encoding, of searches, of collation, of UI presentation to citizens, training institutions, financing institutions, administrators of the system. In other words, the budgets for an administrative program are targeted at i18n compliant software.

Those administrative programs might be at a city level, a county level, a region level, a national level, even at a pan-national level, such as with the European Union, which serves citizens of Europe at large. The combined budgets of those IT departments are simply very large and can only be applied to i18n solutions.

Too expensive right now… prepare for internationalization later!

Companies considering internationalization are inevitably faced with one key factor they cannot ignore: cost. Internationalization is expensive. For any application involving complex data and potentially millions of lines of code to work properly across multiple local platforms, the costs of localization will be significant.  As a result, companies sometimes decide against localization after meeting with an internationalization consulting firm because corporate resolve is just not strong enough to take on the challenges (and costs) at that particular moment. Nevertheless, most of these same companies will likely find that internationalization will become a necessity in the not-so-distant future.  The good news: even if a company cannot afford internationalization in their current budget, there are many steps they can take now to prepare for internationalization later, such as gathering locale requirements, learning about Unicode, considering third party components, talking to experienced localization experts, refining their planning, and more.

For more information on this topic also refer to article “What If Internationalization Expectations Exceed Your Budget? – Significantly” by Adam Asnes and learn how your company can save resources, time and money by taking a few proactive steps now in order to make their eventual internationalization easier, less expensive, (and less painful) when the time is right.