Then, a couple of years later, I was successful in attracting Rockwell Automation, IBM, UPS, Seiko Instruments, Texas Instruments, American Airlines, Honda, Deere and Company, Mercury Marine, Dupont, Bristol Myers Squibb, FMC, United Technologies among others, to visit Pittsburgh (not an easy thing to do) where my next employer was based (also now merged and remerged out of existence). We tried to show off the technology that nearby Carnegie Mellon University was busily working on: machine translation, speech recognition, and other tools to speed documentation and translation. I couldn’t believe how quickly these firms all came to see what was being developed. Corporate managers in charge of translation and the recent art of localization would then go to ATA (American Translations Association) and STC (Society for Technical Communications Meetings) looking for new technology. There was no other place to go.

Then we started selling a lot of projects based on dollars per page. We stopped advertising in the Yellow Pages and started trying media like Forbes. And then a community began to develop in this industry. The first sense of community arrived with a publication, now defunct, called The Electric Word. To oversimplify history, the modern Wired magazine evolved from The Electric Word. I couldn’t get enough of what was being written. But the industry was still not very far along. In 1992 I remember one cartoon I saw in the New Yorker. It showed one fellow with a frown talking to another saying, “The Spanish word for floppy disc is not a tortilla.”

Then LISA appeared on my radar screen for the first time. I went to my first LISA Forum in 1995. A couple of years thereafter I heard Franz Rau, who was then the Director of Internal Tools Development at Microsoft, predict how far localization would go by 2005. We surpassed his predictions. At this same meeting in Washington D.C., I heard Rory Cowan of LioNBRIDGE Technologies lecture us all about inflection points, presaging the advent of modern process management in the world’s second oldest profession. The Internet intervened. The translation, if not localization, capital of the world quickly shifted to Silicon Valley or Ireland. Ireland?

I heard more and more companies talking about “strategic languages.” And I saw corporate business cards evolve into ones that then had titles such as Globalization Manager. This was an improvement from one I had seen three years earlier with Manager, Human Factors Interface. And companies started buying projects on a fee basis.

In 1995 a fellow whose name I forget started a company called World Ready Software and estimated that 800 multilingual software packages were on the market, from simple font packages to entire operating systems. And these were just the ones that were for sale. Companies with heavy-duty multilingual needs like Lucent Technologies developed their own systems.

New language magazines appeared, as did other seminars. LISA began surveying the localization business as early as 1993. Following LISA’s lead, and by interviewing many of its member companies, research into the industry was started by firms like IDC, Forrester, Ovum and Allied. Companies started to go public, and as they did research analysts started covering the industry. More localization seminars appeared. I counted ten different seminars this fall including, for the first time, one at Comdex.

In the face of this, people started to ask is LISA relevant? When it began it filled a vacuum but with so much new technology on the marketplace and a variety of other forums available, and companies developing their own tools that they necessarily want to keep quiet about, what is the purpose of getting together? Hasn’t LISA performed its original purpose?

I would like two make two points: first, you can never get enough good information, and, second, the task of teaching globalization is just started. In another incarnation, I was involved in agribusiness and served as a director of an agribusiness-consulting firm. In 1976 the sugar industry was changing into the sweetener industry as high fructose corn syrup began to replace traditional sugar in a lot of uses. When you drink Coca-Cola today it is more likely to have high fructose corn syrup than traditional sugar. The consulting firms thought that this would be a good time to do a syndicated research project (also called a multi-client study) to trace the changes and predict the impact. This not unlike what IDC plans to do with the localization industry today. We priced the study accordingly and waited for orders to come in. One of the orders came from Coca Cola, which consumes 10% of the sugar used in the United States. I was surprised. Why would someone that knows everything about the market want to buy into this? I called the director of purchasing at Coca-Cola and asked him “Why did you buy this when you already know everything?” He responded “Sure we buy more than anyone and know a lot, which means we can leverage any additional information we can get.”

This applies to localization as well. I think that to be successful, you always need to access and act on additional information. I would argue that LISA provides such a forum and sense of community to get it.

LISA had also realized that it needs to do more than encourage us to “preach to the choir.” This is US slang for preaching to the already converted. Even though many more companies know that they can make more sales in globalizing their web sites and other means of communications, probably an equal number don’t know, so plenty of unconverted remain. Why is that?

In the United States part of the problem is only 10% of the population is multilingual. And this means many top business people don’t speak languages other than English. Here is an even more provocative thought. Many managers don’t even know that English is a language—like air, it just is. It’s something you don’t think about. And if you cannot understand the nuances and impact of your native tongue how can you understand what it means in other languages.

You don’t believe me? We had secured a nice contract with American Airlines to cover a lot a lot of their customer documentation in other languages; we were asked among other things to explain Frequent Flier miles to a whole group of other cultures. And we had just started working with Sabre, their computerized reservations system, to make that work in other languages as well. I recall trying to send a document we translated into Portuguese to their headquarters in Fort Worth. They were using an IBM AS400 system and could open the document but for some reason the accents were missing. We figured out how they could use code we gave them to go back and figure out where and what the accents were. This got too difficult for the communications manager we were working with at American Airlines and she handed this over to the MIS manager. He thought about it for a while and said: “You know this seems like a lot of trouble, why can’t you just do the translations in such a way to use words that don’t have any accents!”

This will be an ongoing problem—especially as IT managers, and not just Communications Managers and VPs of International Sales, are now involved in localization projects. It is the IT function that typically have the least exposure to other languages. (No,C++ and Java are not languages in which most people communicate.) This is why E-Learning is so exciting—it has brought localization into the realm of corporate education and opened up the possibilities of using the net to teach languages. A synergy now exists between localization and language learning that never exited before.

Accordingly a lot of work has to be done to teach business about the values of using other languages in every aspect of their communications. Using another English idiom, “you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” I think the industry has brought the horse to the water, but we all have to teach it to drink. Perhaps one compelling message would be to show that globalization is good not only for a company’s sales but also for your career—General Electric recently promoted Jeff Immelt to be the next chairman based on how he successfully globalized one of its more profitable subsidiaries, GE Medical Systems.

The purpose of this issue of the LISA newsletter is to show where we have come from and where we are headed. In looking at some of the best articles we can remember that there is a lot of history to share and take advantage of. Even if one company decides to “evangelize” it will often get diverted once sales or customer service of its own clients intervene—it is always easier for an organization to gather together in the effort to “evangelize” an industry’s message than it is for someone to do it alone.

I hope you enjoy the issue and the effort that a lot of people put into it.

John Freivalds