Paris 2004

Leading-Edge Strategies,Technologies and Standards

Holiday Inn Disney, Marne-la-Vallée, France
11-14 October 2004

The Localization Industry Standards Association’s 50th International Conference will go beyond the usual discourse about multilingual content management challenges and solutions to address the practicality of international products delivery, applications, and costs as well as how a larger Europe and companies wanting access to its markets can best manage business practices like emerging collaborative systems, outsourcing management, and open standards deployment.

Managing multilingual content is this century’s most crucial challenge to social, political and economic sustainability. For example, since the May 1st enlargement to include 10 new countries, the European Union is faced with an expanding content management problem that global businesses have wrestled with for over a decade. Europe has grown to a 25-member bloc with 20 official languages, and 280 possible language combinations. As a result, their budget for translating documents and on-demand requirements has grown to 1 billion Euro annually, the current staff of 1300 translators will double, and the number of pages translated will increase to nearly 2.5 million pages in less than 2 years. Translation has become Europe’s biggest “boom” industry, as a majority of the 380 million Europeans speak only their own language and the EU mandates that each member be entitled to information in their own tongue.

Companies seeking to penetrate growing European markets in sectors like gaming, automotive and the Internet industries must understand the importance of regional diversity and the emphasis placed on issues such as language and technology. While the motive for such a focus on translation may come from, as the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation stated, “a question of rights, democracy, equality, as well as being part of a peace strategy and a multicultural society,” the fact is that reasons given for joining the EU have shifted from general historic and geopolitical reasons to more concrete economic requirements. The economic benefits sought by all players extend to global business and trade as a whole, while companies and countries search for effective tools to manage multilingual content, open-source standards will become increasingly critical to achieve scalable solutions.