Asia is witnessing the emergence of newly affluent consumer classes with very different expectations and demands from Western markets and from markets that have traditionally served as mainstays for Western companies. Hedrick-Wong examines the rise of these new classes and how they will impact both Western enterprises doing business in Asia and Asian firms entering Western markets. Along with providing macroeconomic data, he will highlight the cultural and economic issues that global companies must be aware of in order to be successful in Asia and around the world.

As China takes center stage in an increasingly flat world, business globalization plus software innovation are key focuses of investment by its government and business leaders. Hsu will outline current globalization trends in the Middle Kingdom and share his predictions on how markets and technology development will be affected. He will also discuss why the underlying forces behind next-generation software development, coupled with China's advanced infrastructure, ultra-efficient supply chains, and growing pools of engineering talent, are converging to make China a strategic leader in creating tomorrow's technologies.

Key companies in the Chinese market will discuss the differences between Chinese outsourced development service providers and their counterparts in other markets. What are China’s strengths? What challenges face Chinese companies? How can international companies ensure that their plans will succeed in China and leverage China’s specific strengths? Why does the future of both globalization and software development lie in China?

Since the establishment of Adobe’s China R&D center in 2006, its globalization group has transformed itself from re-exporting localization services to U.S. headquarters to supporting local market growth. Based on its efforts, China is now the fastest growing Flash/Flex developer community for Adobe outside of the U.S. Huang will share why successful globalization in emerging markets requires changes in corporate thinking and how this affects attitudes towards offshore development. She will also explore the key role that Localization Managers now play as businesspeople to engage and enable local markets to contribute to a company's strategic business objectives.

Ancient Chinese philosophers believed that climate, geography and people were the three main factors to consider when analyzing a situation, and that dao (“essence”), lue (“strategy”) and shu (“method”) were the three primary concepts for making strategic decisions. Zhong will illustrate the wisdom of this philosophy and show how modern management can utilize it. He will share how it still influences how Chinese people deal with themselves and with others, and why it offers particular advantages to Chinese managers vis-a-vis collaboration and conflict resolution when working with international partners.

The IBM China Development Lab team has successfully used a collaborative model to centralize software globalization tasks for Greater China team for several years. Teams from Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai and Vietnam work closely with development labs in the U.S., Ireland, Japan and other countries to complete globalization testing and translation tasks. Pan shares the expertise, tools and processes used by her team to coordinate and manage IBM's global virtual team in this region.

Ensuring (and assuring) the flow of high-quality information between stakeholders across the planet brings special challenges, especially in the age of outsourcing. To remain agile, many of the smartest companies in the world are introducing Information Quality Management best practice, supported by tools that enable them to develop and enforce quality standards throughout the information development process. Bredenkamp will share cases studies from IBM, Symantec and Cisco, who are on the cutting edge of these developments.

The AAMT (Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation) has established UTX (Universal Terminology eXchange), a specification for sharable dictionaries across different machine translation systems. It is now working on UTX-Simple, a stripped-down version of UTX. Okura will explain the specification and share AAMT's plans for advancing the project and building user communities to support it.

As Chinese industry moves up the value chain, science and technology, patents, social and economic development, and even culture and history are acquiring new importance for businesses in Greater China. As a result, demand for Chinese-to-English translation is increasing, but translators who can handle this need are still relatively few in number and find their jobs complicated by the “unnatural” nature of much of the text they translate. To meet this challenge, there is now growing adoption of MT in China. Wong and Jian will discuss the latest trends and then share how an MT system developed in conjunction with the CA (Computer Associates) localization team in Beijing is now used to address both cost and quality issues in a production environment.

Localization and globalization standards have made dramatic strides in recent years and helped solve many problems. In this panel, international and Chinese experts will examine where standards have succeeded in China and where they need to improve. They will identify core areas where Chinese companies, as well as international companies doing business in China, can leverage standards to improve processes, reduce time to market, and better address Chinese market needs.

Certification has become a major issue in the globalization industry. The panelists will cover the efforts being made to provide meaningful certification for globalization companies in China.

Lin will explore the increasing importance of patent protection in the process of globalization and how patent translation itself plays a key role in patent protection. She will share examples of successful patent translations and how to apply a standard operational procedure to the process, along with future trends in the sector.

The challenge of managing global content lies in how to ensure that all of your content is there at the right time, in the right language and consistent to your brand. Tao shares how technology can help through global authoring, terminology management, translation memory, process management and QA.

Globalization objectives are best attained when companies are globally consistent while remaining regionally relevant. Cisco Services uses Global Centers of Excellence to programmatize consistency in the delivery of services to its customers. Built on a footprint of delivering services “virtually” using Web 2.0 tools (Smart Global Delivery), Cisco now offers this capability from both India and China. Saxena and Wen will share a case study that describes Smart Global Delivery for advanced services to customers in China, Japan, and Korea using an intelligent hub and spoke support infrastructure.

Lionbridge's iconic logo was born of the goal to serve as a bridge to Asian localization, through China. More than a decade later, Lionbridge views China as much more than a gateway. Shannon will share how China is now the epicenter for all of the company's converged offerings and how it has weaved globalization into its outsourced development and testing services.

Only a few years ago, the dominant model for outsourcing to China and India was one in which routine, labor-intensive tasks were sent to outsourced service providers that served as extensions of teams for U.S. and European-based companies. This model has shifted as companies have realized that local service providers have unique skills and added value. The focus has moved away from “dumping” tasks to one of active partnership. Increasingly, companies now involve their local outsourcing partners in higher-level, future-oriented tasks to ensure that local market concerns are addressed early on. Wang and Maheshwari will discuss Adobe's evolving outsourcing practices, as well as the results of an exhaustive survey conducted among Adobe’s outsourcing partners about their capabilities, education, skillsets, structure and scalability.

Prior to 2009, marketing content localization for HP’s Technology Solutions Group (TSG) was decentralized and conducted in various countries. The processes were inconsistent and costly, and business units faced difficulties in launching marketing events on time and ensuring brand consistency. Duan will share how HP consolidated and successfully streamlined TSG’s worldwide marketing localization processes to shorten time to market, to deliver a consistent marketing experience and to reduce costs.

O’Dowd will discuss strategies for scaling and growing localization processes to achieve maximum productivity and automation. He will cover the challenges, conflicts and main objectives to be considered when examining processes and explain how companies can minimize their workload and maximize productivity, based on real business data. O'Dowd will also share insights into the day-to-day workings and current/future challenges of leading localization centers in China and Europe.

Although it is commonly agreed in theory that terminology management is a crucial part of the documentation/localization process for accessing international markets, it is often a secondary priority and treated as a generator, rather than a saver, of costs. Słodowicz will discuss the direct benefits of consistent terminology management with respect to quality and cost. He will also review current models for establishing valid terminology and how to ensure their use in a multilingual environment.

The translation of legal materials has become a critical issue that must be addressed as more and more companies expand their business coverage. Due to the highly specific nature of legal systems, the localization of legal materials is not only the mapping of words in different languages, but also the mapping of legal effects and intentions. Huang will address how companies can determine the correctness of translation for legal documents and how they can improve and maintain quality.

The software industry has recognized some general design and implementation principles for globalization. However, companies face additional globalization challenges when designing complicated software architectures that involve many technologies. Tong will use Java EE multi-tier architecture as an example of this challenge. He will discuss the specific globalization capability of each tier and best practices for integrating them vis-a-vis the globalization perspective. He will also cover enabling globalization for legacy systems.

Localization tools developers face the same pressures as developers of other products. Prioste will discuss how Welocalize has successfully leveraged a distributed team in Ireland, China and the U.S. to deliver rapid turnaround times for development tasks and bug fixes. He will show how the company's infrastructure has enabled it to successfully leverage China in the internal development process, and how Chinese skills and expertise have been integrated into Welocalize's successful, globally distributed development process.

Many customers require applications that support multilingual platforms with localization capabilities. While IBM Lotus Notes can deliver these, it has a rather unique architecture, and its globalization/localization process is rather complex and expensive when compared to other Java-based applications. Ji will cover best practices for developing multilingual Notes applications, while simultaneously reducing effort and cost.

The later a software defect is discovered in the development cycle, the more it costs to fix it. Unlike multicultural support defects, which can be revealed in English builds, translatability defects can be detected only after the build is translated or pseudo-translated. However, these defects can actually be detected and fixed during early test phases through “pseudo translation.” Liu will cover errors that impact translation and how to create and use a pseudo-build for testing.

Tsou explores how to increase testing productivity through automation without expending a large effort to prepare automation scripts for multiple languages. He will cover how to develop automation scripts for different languages and the methods for maintaining single executable scripts.

CSOFT launches a localization community site, L10Nworks.com full of useful tools, resources, and a industry forum. Marisa Bowers, Global Business Development Manager for Asia Pacific will lead this resource session to discuss what’s in it for you and why you should visit today!

In order for localization and globalization processes to be integrated with software development processes, a greater degree of automation and efficiency is required. While the human element involved in localization will never be eliminated, there is still considerable room for process improvement. Industry visionaries and leading implementers will discuss what is required to take localization to the next level of automation, both in China and around the world, and what developers can do today to integrate themselves into today's quickly evolving globalization supply chain.