This session will examine how Taiwan and Mainland China are working together today to provide more compelling service offerings to foreign clients in a time of economic uncertainty and political backlash against outsourcing in western countries. In this panel successful local and international companies will discuss how business models for small and medium enterprises are changing and how they can take advantages of cross-Straights business opportunities and the strengths of greater China to succeed in international business. It will examine how localization can be used as a value-added technical service to increase the attractiveness of outsourced development services in Greater China. The panel will also explore Greater China’s extensive investments in technology infrastructure in recent years, how foreign investors can take advantage of them, and what the U.S. and Europe can learn from the Chinese experience.

Taiwan has been well known for decades for its manufacturing ability, making Taiwan almost synonymous with OEM and ODM. However, Taiwan’s industry, faced with intense competition in the global market, has chosen design as a main strategy for further improvement. Taiwan Design Center (TDC), a national design center in Taiwan, has established a cooperative mechanism between domestic industries, government agencies, and academic and research institutes to assist the evolution of Taiwanese industry into design-oriented enterprises. In this presentation, Mr. Tony K.M. Chang provides an inside look at the transformation of Taiwanese industry from “Made in Taiwan” to “Designed in Taiwan.”

The challenges and considerations faced in building globalized, enterprise-level Web Services software products will be discussed, including issues of interoperability, security, performance, reliability, scalability, and manageability for global products using various current open Web Services standards. Recommendations for strategies for building global Web Services products for international markets will also be presented.

Facebook is available in 35 languages, with more to come. This linguistic support is the result of a crowd-sourcing translation model. This presentation explains the Facebook translation model, why it was adopted, and the advantages and challenges of this model. It will discuss the advantages of crowd-sourcing translation and provide a demo of the Facebook translation tool.

Open solutions within a localization value chain can a) lower the cost for businesses adoption of a standard industry localization value chain, b) enable service providers to meet increasing demand for translated information, and c) increase the value of linguistic suppliers/translators in a Web 2.0 world. This presentation will focus on how these solutions can be used to define a standard service profile that can be tailored for various industry sectors. A case study of how IBM mapped its value stream mapping will show how profiling internal business processes enabled the company to gain overall process improvements. It also look at the entire life cycle for global market management and creation of solutions, including how localization profiles can be applied to efficiently manage cost and time to market.

The presentation explains Adobe’s approach to measuring the status and progress of its products with regard to World Readiness. It will discuss the different aspects of this model and some of its functional areas, integrated measurement tools that enable product teams to make internationalization part of their workflow, and various aspects of scalability and resource distribution needed to achieve World-Ready software.

This presentation covers some of the lessons learned and strategies used to globalize a RIA (Rich Internet Application) Software as a Service (SaaS) application used by over half of the Fortune 100 companies, translated into 36 languages, and used in over 200 countries. Particular attention will be placed on the strengths of using Adobe Flex in this kind of application, and some of the problems we faced.

Localizing games poses particular challenges versus traditional software due to the way in which content and application are mixed. Shu-Liang Balzac Chang will introduce how Microsoft helps developers create localization friendly games. He will also discuss a web-based translation tool that enables translators to understand more about the flow and content of games while they are translating in order to deliver better localization quality. Finally he will outline a methodology for localization testing of games delivers systematic QA benefits.

Videogame localization poses new challenges to the localization industry, presenting a completely new playground for translators and localizers more familiar with localizing business software applications. Technology-driven interactive digital media form a global industry set to grow further as affordable means of entertainment especially in the context of worldwide economic downturn. The increasing presence of Asian game developers means profound linguistic and cultural implications for localization. Focusing on the issue of cultural adaptation for Asian game localization, this presentation discusses the need for a finely-tuned localization strategy in order to bring the same game play “experience” of the original to the player in the target market. In order to further push the boundary of today’s approaches to game localization and to explore creative solutions, the research function of universities should be fully exploited through an industry-academia partnership.

Many games are produced without proper planning for localization due to cost, time to market, and competition from other companies. This presentation describes a simple, low-cost, and low-risk approach to localizing a mobile phone game. It utilizes standards and technologies currently used in the localization industry today. The presentation describes a workflow used to localize a legacy mobile phone game, Monster Madness, into four different languages - Spanish, German, Korean and Arabic, despite the fact that it was never internationalized. The presentation will cover methods for identifying localizable content and restructuring source code to facilitate localization and present the results and benefits from this approach.

As companies engage in global business they must be prepared to meet customer requirements in all their markets. These requirement are often very different from those of their “home” market and require considerable forethought and attention to detail during product design and engineering, particularly when product development tasks are outsourced. This panel of experts will discuss how businesses can (1) identify their customers’ needs, (2) develop strategies to meet those needs, and (3) assess their success in meeting those needs.

Traditional models for the development of globalized software have served software developers for over two decades. These models, however, have not kept pace with fundamental changes in how software is developed. In this presentation, Dale Schultz describes how IBM was able to define its globalization process in ways that reflect better design principles. In particular, IBM has moved away from a model that starts with a monolingual software version that is then “internationalized” and “localized” for a specific market to produce a new monolingual version of the product. At IBM, in contrast, multicultural support is a key engineering component in software development and translation becomes a “cosmetic” task limited to the user interface, documentation, help, and other textual components of the product. This model has the advantage of clearly distinguishing between translation and functional development and pushes multicultural requirements upstream to a core development competency. As outsourced software developers adopt a similar model and integrate multicultural issues into core development plans, they will be able to offer more value to their customers and better support their international expansion plans.

This presentation outlines common challenges faced when preparing content for global websites. It describes their solutions and illustrates the importance of proper global Information Architecture and streamlining globalization processes throughout different organization.

The recent economic downturn’s impact has shown how important it is for Mainland China and Taiwan to collaborate in order to maintain competitiveness in a global economy. By leveraging each other’s strengths, both economies can increase their success in international markets. Understanding the requirements of international partners and offering compelling, value-rich services will help lead Greater Chine to success in an increasingly globalized world.

The increasing integration of national economies with each other has had a profound impact on how businesses operate. Quality, rather than geography, has become the determining factor for industrial success. This shift has required the development of a technological infrastructure for dealing with variables of culture and language. In turn the widespread availability of globalization services and technologies has spurred technological change in other areas as well. This presentation will look at the European Union experience and the lessons that can be learned around the world for dealing with globalization and the social and economic changes it brings about.

Adobe Creative Suite software is widely used in global document design and production. The various components of the Creative Suite support many features that can be used to streamline global production. This presentation will cover some of the core features, including features new to Creative Suite 4, important in global workflows. It will also address methods for dealing with some of the limitations in current versions of this package.

As Taiwan increasingly moves from a manufacturing locale to one known globally for design, what challenges will it face? What changes can we expect to see in the next few years and what implications do these have for companies partnering with Taiwanese businesses or providing globalization services in the Asia-Pacific region?