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Taipei 2009
Global Design & Innovation
6-9 April 2009, The Grand Hotel, Taipei, Taiwan
The 2009 LISA Forum Asia in Taipei features two days of presentations plus workshops and roundtables on the theme of Global Design & Innovation. With speakers from leading organizations, including Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, iii, Taiwan Design Center, and the European Union, the Forum will focus on how companies in Asia and around the world can improve their design processes by focusing on global issues and how companies that implement globalization best practices will expand brand awareness and improve their international customer support.
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The New Breed of Chinese Outsourcers: Building Global Champions
KEYNOTE: Collaboration between Taiwan and Mainland China in the Global Economy
Sam Shen – Senior Consultant and Professional Analyst, Institute for Information Industry (III)
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 Language Industry as a Driver for Technological Change in a Global Economy
Karl-Johan Lönnroth – Director General, European Commission Directorate – General for Translation (DGT)
The multiplicity of languages has long been regarded as an obstacle to business, international trade and political and monetary integration. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman even predicted that it would prevent Europe from ever having a single currency. More and more companies, however, recognize nowadays that catering for the languages of their clients is not just a cost factor – actually, it can provide them with a competitive edge. The same happens in the public sector: from Johannesburg to New York, from New Caledonia to Brussels, action is being taken by local and central authorities to face the mounting pressure for multilingual communication between citizens and institutions.
The Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission (DGT) has played a central role in stimulating and testing linguistic research and development activities, including new language tools, in Europe for half a century. Technological advances prompted by an increasingly multilingual knowledge society can prove extremely useful for both European and international businesses facing the global economy and the challenges of localization. Lönnroth will look at the European Union experience and the lessons that can be learned by the rest of the world for dealing with globalization, along with the social and economic changes it brings about.
Taiwan Inc.: Positioning Taiwan as a Global Sourcing Partner
Grace Chen – Chairman and CEO, Oceansoft International
Joseph Hsu – Chairman of the Board, Symbio Investment Holdings Company
Taiwan Inc. is at a crossroads. How can it successfully move up the supply chain to become a valued global sourcing partner beyond the IT and electronics sectors? What are the very real challenges and the great opportunities that exist to bring Taiwanese expertise to Greater China, Asia Pacific and to the world? How important are globalization services like internationalization and localization engineering? How can Taiwan Inc. increase cross-straits collaboration with Mainland China to provide more compelling service offerings to foreign clients in a time of economic uncertainty and political backlash against outsourcing in the West?
As highly respected entrepreneurs, the panelists have very successful track records in outsourcing with Greater China and the West. They will lead a discussion that examines the various business models available to Taiwan Inc. as it moves more aggressively into the global economy.
Turning 花鳥風月 into a Painkiller: Extreme Cultural Adaptation or “Fragrant” Approach?
Dr. Minako O’Hagan – Senior Lecturer, Dublin City University
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 the 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, O’Hagan will discuss the finely tuned localization strategy required to bring the same game play “experience” of the original to the player in the target market. To further push the boundary of today’s approaches to game localization and to explore creative solutions, she also makes the case that the university research function should be fully exploited through an industry-academia partnership.
Co-author – Dr. Carmen Mangiron, Dublin City University.
Localizing Games for Mobile Phones
Leonie Troy – Postgraduate Research Student, Institute of Technology Blanchardstown
Video game localization presents new challenges to localizers and translators alike. Unlike the majority of business software applications, which are developed in English-speaking countries, many games are developed in Asian countries, with profound linguistic and cultural implications for localization. Drawing on earlier case studies on how Japanese console games are localized for culturally diverse markets, Troy will share the extreme cultural adaptation that is necessary to bring the same game play “experience” of the original to the target market player.
Taiwan Design Power
Oliver Lin – Director of International Design Exchange Section, Taiwan Design Center (TDC)
Taiwan is so well-known for its manufacturing ability that it has become almost synonymous with OEM and ODM. Now faced with today’s intense competition in the wayward global market, Taiwan’s industry has chosen design as a main strategy to move further up the global supply chain. To support this, the Taiwan Design Center (TDC) has established a cooperative mechanism among domestic industry, government agencies and academic and research institutes to assist Taiwanese companies to evolve into design-oriented enterprises. Chang will provide an inside look at the transformation of Taiwan industry, a process that will take it from ‘Made in Taiwan’ to ‘Designed in Taiwan.’
Building International Enterprise-Level Web Services
Symon Chang – Principal Member of Technical Staff, Oracle Corp.
By definition, Web Services are open standards based, cross-platform, and the best technology for developing global products. However, adopting open standards-based Web Services will not guarantee that your software becomes a global product. Neither will it ensure that your product can successfully compete in the international market, especially if it is enterprise-level software.
Chang will share the challenges presented by interoperability, security, performance, reliability, scalability and manageability vis-a-vis the various open Web Services standards. He will also provide recommendations for strategies for building globalized, enterprise-level Web Services software products.
Global English for a Global Audience: How Controlled Authoring Can Help You Achieve Product Quality
Dr. Frans Wijma – Managing Director, Shufra
Shumin Chen – Business Development Manager, Shufra
English is the main language in technical documentation around the world. However, English can be difficult to understand especially for non-native speakers.
Chen will highlight the common problems that users face with documentation written in Standard English and how this can be overcome by the use of international writing standards like Simplified Technical English (STE). By using actual written examples, Shufra will demonstrate the benefits of STE as well as the many long-term cost-related advantages that businesses can reap from it.
Eliminating Language Barriers, A Key To Global Competitiveness
Engelrey Abalos – Project Manager, PTSGI
Abalos will share how language services providers such as PTSGI have enabled Taiwan’s success as a global high-tech manufacturer, and how they continue to play a vital role in serving businesses that operate both in and outside Taiwan. He will also discuss how PTSGI can help the industry in the current global marketplace.
The Internet’s Impact on the Language Industry: The Opportunity for the Asia-Pacific Markets
Dion Wiggins – CEO, Asia Online
Asia has had phenomenal success in providing outsourced product and application development services in recent years, but challenging economic conditions now require them to deliver more integrated offerings that respond to customer demands. Until now, outsourced development and localization services have generally been treated as separate issues, with localization largely handled within the narrow domains of single countries by companies that lack a full global perspective.
At the same time, global product development outsourcers have often not fully understood localization issues or not been fully prepared to properly address globalization requirements. This decoupling within outsourced development has had a negative impact on quality and responsiveness from both sides.
Currently, there are huge untapped opportunities for the outsourcing of globalization services within Asia that would allow development companies in Greater China to offer more value and better cost structures to their clients. No single country, however, has all of the resources to adequately deal with all of Asia. To achieve the integration that’s needed, localization service providers must globalize their businesses, while outsourced global product development providers must move to localize their offerings to provide globalization services via partners to their clients.
Wiggins will discuss these issues, using Thailand as a case study to show the opportunities available to companies to improve their own service offerings through intra-Asian outsourcing.
Using Open Standards to Automate the Global Content Production Chain
Helena Chapman – Program Director, IBM
Open solutions within a localization value chain can (1) lower the cost for business’ adoption of a standard industry localization value chain, (2) enable service providers to meet increasing demand for translated information, and (3) increase the value of linguistic suppliers/translators in a Web 2.0 world. Chapman will focus on how these open solutions can be used to define a standard service profile that can be tailored for various industry sectors.
A case study of how IBM performed a value stream mapping will show how profiling internal business processes enabled the company to gain overall process improvements. She also looks at the entire lifecycle for global market management and creation of solutions, including how localization profiles can be applied to efficiently manage cost and time to market.
Building “World Ready” Software Products: An Adobe Case Study
Dirk Meyer – Product Manager, Adobe Systems
Meyer will explain Adobe’s approach to measuring the status and progress of its products with regard to World Readiness. He will also share the integrated measurement tools that enable product teams to make internationalization part of their workflow, along with various aspects of scalability and resource distribution needed to achieve World Ready software.
Panel: Preparing Your Company to Meet International Product Requirements
Helena Chapman – Program Director, IBM
Dale Schultz – Globalization Test Architect, IBM
Dirk Meyer – Product Manager, Adobe Systems
As companies engage in global business, they must be prepared to meet customer requirements in all of their markets. These requirements are often very different from those of their home market and thus 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.
Designing Global Websites
Youngmin Radochonski – Globalization Architect, Sun Microsystems
Radochonski will share strategies to help you overcome some of common challenges presented by the preparation and management of global content for global websites. She will discuss the importance of proper global information architecture and globalization process streamlining throughout the enterprise.
Practical Strategies for Document Internationalization in Adobe Creative Suite
Arle Lommel – OSCAR Chair, Open Standards Committee, OSCAR, LISA
Adobe Creative Suite software is widely used in global document design and production. Its various components support many features that can be used to streamline global production. Lommel will cover some of the core features, including some that are new to Creative Suite 4, that are important for global workflows. He will also address methods for dealing with some of the limitations in current versions of the software.
How to Make Translation Cheaper, Faster and Better
Dr. Frans Wijma – Managing Director, Shufra
Management of Cost Saving and Quality for Mass Project
SeungHwan Lee – Localization Project Manager, Saltlux
This presentation is the case study for the mass project. We will go over the mass project with some risk estimation & management and practical solutions, which we have used for it. As for the mass project, it should have been made by several linguists simultaneously within tight schedule. So there were many risks estimated and decided some solutions like the online TM based on server – Across.
Redefining the Software Globalization Development Process
Dale Schultz – Globalization Test Architect, IBM
Traditional models for globalized software development have served us for over two decades. However, they have not kept pace with fundamental changes in how software is developed. Schultz will describe how IBM was able to define its globalization process in ways that reflect better design principles. In particular, it 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. In contrast, multicultural support is now a key engineering component, enabling translation to be 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 as 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.
