What has changed? There has been no dramatic shift in the membership. LISA does not publish member statistics, but based on information in the recently prepared LISA directory, 45% of members are vendors, 42% are publishers, and the rest are academics, consultants, analysts, etc. So why are vendors more responsive?

Vendors: more is at stake?

These results most likely reflect a subtle transition in the localisation industry. Put simply, the industry is maturing. The leading publishers have become extremely sophisticated practitioners of localisation.

The highly visible "directive clients" have shaped the industry in its formative years:

• spawning localisation companies through spin-offs or start-ups from within the computing and software companies
• defining processes and methods where none existed before
• demanding tools, or developing them internally, to handle the unique problems of localisation
• training the translation industry in the ways of software, adding a new level of skill on the service side.

The leading packaged software vendors are in better control of their localisation programmes than ever before. In some ways the worst is over for these companies. They understand the technical and the business issues involved in localisation, and while their processes may not be perfect, they are steadily improving. Many of these companies have reached a peak on the learning curve and they have as much to teach as to learn about localisation.

Some translation vendors have ridden this same learning curve, often with the assistance of their customers. Most have not. Moreover, the translation industry is itself at a watershed, and will enjoy the opportunities and the risks of dramatic changes:

• the localisation movement has made translation more visible, brought new players to the market, spurred consolidation into larger service organisations
• competition is fierce (both between companies, and between human and machine-based solutions), yet outsourcing continues to grow
• language is not the only focus any more - vendors have to be more than translators, and they have to add new kinds of value.

This latter point is particularly significant for vendors, who are forced to move both upstream in the product cycle (particularly for their software clients), and downstream toward more "information manufacturing" functions. Vendors without these broader skills are marginalised, pushed down the buying chain, and in the long run may disappear altogether.

Vendors may, therefore, simply have more to gain from participation in LISA.

Where is the value added?

The survey results highlight the opportunities for vendors to move beyond a focus on pure translation. As Figure 1 illustrates, vendor revenues are fairly closely tracking publisher costs for software localisation and documentation activities. Vendors earn proportionately somewhat more for documentation tasks, due to the significant cost of document translation. Their revenues for project management are, on the other hand, proportionately much higher, while earnings from information manufacturing are substantially less significant than what publishers are spending. When it comes to the downstream end - what I've called information manufacturing - many localisation vendors are out of the loop.

Figure 1. Proportion of costs to publishers, and revenues to vendors, of localisation activities. Representing % of costs/revenues for each type of activity.

As packaging and distribution moves off the page, and onto electronic formats, more of these activities are likely to go to vendors who can handle all phases of multilingual information provision - not just pure translation.

Upstream, there is a remarkably close fit between publisher costs and vendor revenues for everything except document authoring. Both sides of the market report the same proportionate cost/revenues for internationalisation (4%), compilation and testing (10%) and pre-press set-up (7%). But publishers are spending nearly 10% on technical authoring, very little of which is being outsourced.

Vendors are developing an understanding how these processes work throughout the entire international product cycle, and this gives the localisation industry much of its current vitality.

What does this mean for LISA?

LISA is fundamentally a forum for exchanging information about localisation. The balance between interests of suppliers and clients needs to be continually recalibrated, to assure that the organisation grows and prospers. The evolving focus on issues such as tools, or information handling standards (e.g. SGML), or emerging markets (Eastern Europe, Asia) is evidence that LISA is a useful - and robust - forum.

Part of the process of recalibration, however, involves attracting new members, and here I believe there is work to be done. The 25 or so publishers who participate in LISA activities are a tiny fraction of the software developers who would profit by, and contribute to, the growth of the organisation. While the group is in no way dominated by vendor members, the results of the survey suggest that the supply side is more actively seeking information and development. This is a good time, therefore, to actively seek new members from the demand side, and I believe this should be primarily from the ranks of mainstream software publishers, custom developers, and systems integrators who increasingly face the need to supply multilingual IT solutions in global organisations.

For those who did complete the second annual LISA survey, results will be available shortly. The questionnaire was not simple, but the results are correspondingly rich and interesting. Those who did not participate are invited to join the next round!