Due to increasing markets and large account requirements, Unisys forecasts that their product localization and translation volumes could grow as much as 40-50% in three to five years. The Middle East and Eastern Europe represent the largest growth potential. In this area today, approximately 25% of Unisys' current volumes is localized through third-party channels like distributors.

To continue to meet this kind of growth they have organized their localization activities around regional localization expertise centers called "hubs" . The hubs are central points that respond to the subsidiary's localization requirements. They act as contractors to manage tasks like the translation of files, docs and screens at the request of the subsidiary companies. To ensure that internationalization features are built into the products, the hubs act as vital links between the subsidiary operations and the US Engineering division. They get the internationalization requirements from the subsidiaries and pass it on to engineering so that localization is efficient.

Unisys' localization efforts span the globe. Their European localization center is based in Brussels. With the help of Unisys subsidiaries they are responsible to produce localized products for the Western European and Scandinavian countries. Currently they are spending approximately $4 million for translation and software localization. Their production volumes approach twenty thousand pages a year. The Japanese and Asian localization requirements are managed by the Nihon Unisys and the Hong Kong Asia Group. They produce more localized versions than the Europeans. This group covers the Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand and Burma markets. They spend about $6 million each year. For the Indian and Burmese markets the joint venture between Tata and Unisys manages all localization issues.

Unisys' global marketing objective is to simultaneously ship local language versions with the English release. They believe this will be accomplished between the next three to five years. Currently Unisys experiences considerable lag times that vary between three to eighteen months from the English ship-date pending products and languages. The different factors are country organization and resources, local language resources, and the extent of localization content in the product.

In Europe, for example, the Norwegian, Finnish and Danish language versions are shipped within three weeks of the English ship dates. But these products contain no translated documentation; only a diskette with localization enablers for the keyboard and character set changes. The British English, Italian and Swedish releases take from two to four months to ship but the localization content goes a little deeper into the product (re: packaging and relinking). One hundred percent of the French and German products are localized. These are shipped up to six months after US release dates, as are the Dutch products (with less localized content). But due to the lack of resources, Portuguese and Spanish products wait more than a year to be sold.

Within the next year the goal is to stabilize production time to two months for all European languages. By strengthening the hubs' localization management with the internationalization support of US engineering, they believe they can achieve this goal in 1994 at least for the European languages. Their upstream involvement to help engineering build easily localizable products will result in greater teamwork. Rather than a distributed array of local contacts US engineering will have one focal point so that they can create international products with early beta releases which can be tested in market. This strategy, combined with the hub's ability to select the right service vendors, will enable them to reduce their time-to-market.

Due to Unisys' proprietary operating systems, software translation and engineering, quality assurance and testing will be managed inhouse. However, most of the translation work will be outsourced to service vendors.

The localization centers want to work with service companies who are capable of centrally managing multilingual projects with translations being done in country for Unisys' main markets. It is equally important that their vendors share the same vision of a production scheme based on a strong technical infrastructure and computer aided translation tools. Centralized terminology and project management are the key elements.

Quality assurance has been a problem with some service bureaus. It seems that Unisys has achieved better QA results with their European vendors as opposed to the Americans. In the future they would like to use one vendor for all languages of a given product. And, the long term goal is to give vendors total responsibility for both the documentation and the software localization. Rather than having European engineers localize software, they feel that greater savings can be made by working with reliable partners.

Of course, volumes are a key factor.

Today, not all products are translated into all market languages. The user interface and most on-line information and the on-line help is translated. This procedure is not expected to change much over the next 2-5 years. The user manuals and installation guides for most products are translated. Very few reference manuals are translated.

Due to the overall decrease in forecasted sales the production volumes for the main language versions are diminishing. Unisys is translating less documentation for most products. For example, a server product in 1991 required 4000 pages of documentation to be translated. For the same product today only 1500 pages are being translated.

However, due to the introduction of new language requirements for the Eastern European and Middle East markets, translation workloads are increasing. In 3-5 years, Unisys forecasts a growth in Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Turkish and Arabic. Clearly, their strategy is to invest in new markets.