On a much smaller scale a nevertheless important milestone for 2001 is the third generation (3G) mobile technology which is due for rollout this year by a number of the world’s telcos. This technology converges mobile communication and the Internet, allowing tiny pocket-size devices to link text, images and audio on the Internet from wherever you are. Largely considered as the only service to so far give a taste of 3G applications to come, NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode as of March 2001 boasts over 20 million users who are flexing their finger muscles wherever they are. As you will see in our interview with Mr. David Krane, i-mode is now powered up by Google, increasing search capabilities from 30,000 sites to embrace the entire Internet universe. The enormous i-mode subscriber number is somewhat incongruous with the finance minister’s glum view on Japan’s economy. Perhaps this is just one example of the fact that usable and creative innovation survives economic hard times.

During the interview session with Mr George Lichter of Ask Jeeves, LISA’s Director Michael Anobile observed that economic hardship demands even more efficiency in terms of costs and usability and that this may present opportunities for those companies offering viable solutions to do just that. In the case of Ask Jeeves, that takes the form of a support service by way of providing a human-oriented intelligent question-and-answer tool. I found it intriguing that both i-mode and Ask Jeeves have used in their high-tech services a similar analogy of a trusty human assistant—the former, according to i-mode pioneers, being a hotel concierge and the latter, an archetypal butler.

In order to create more human-oriented systems particularly in a multilingual context, back-end technical adjustments are needed. For example, one of the most basic and yet quirky issues in today’s computing environment is the lack of readiness for multilingual scripts—the issue of character sets and encoding. And as surprising it may be, this affects even religious groups as their “marketplace” is the world. Mr. John Hopkin’s article illustrates the harsh reality of digital publishing environments faced by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when they try to publish in 170 languages! Clearly Unicode has not yet delivered a magic bullet. This is the subject of the article by Mr. Arle Lommel, who provides us with the technical details of where we are at with OpenType and what it offers to make Unicode more user-friendly.

Related to the multilingual capabilities is the issue taken up by Ms. Marilyn Mason of MIT2 who starts a short series focusing on less-prevalent languages of under-developed nations in the context of localization. Her focus is how we will address the digital divide issue and in doing so seize business opportunities. This reminded me of an MT system developed in Japan a long time ago for Swahili and Japanese. I wonder if it is still in use…

One of LISA’s ongoing interests is how to train future localization specialists, as manifested in its LEIT (LISA Education Initiative Taskforce) efforts. In many professional fields there is often a gap between what educational institutions are teaching and what industries are seeking. Professor Ashworth from the Center for Interpretation and Translation Studies at the University of Hawaii discusses how his center is tackling this gap although under severe funding constraints (along with many universities all over the world!). Here too they are faced with character encoding problems, which I suspect are often a factor preventing universities from implementing localization courses in multilingual environments. To reduce the gap between university learning and the coal-face of the workplace, the internship that the Center is supporting seems to be a productive way to educate and train future translators and localizers. It is essentially a partnership between academia and industry and this is what is at the core of the LEIT. Although different in nature, the partnership concept is presented by Ms Virginia Cha as a preferred localization approach in the context of successful globalization of e-Business with her company’s case study on entering the Chinese market. The importance of partnering was emphasized by Ask Jeeves’s entry into the Japanese market and is also apparent with Google in its developments into Asian markets.

The overall theme we chose for this issue is associated with the forthcoming LISA Global Strategies Summit in Singapore and is therefore focused on the Asia-Pacific region. As was evident from our interviews with Ask Jeeves and Google, this region is seen as a key to their globalization strategies and likely to be so for many others. To borrow Mr Lichter’s words: “one cannot imagine a business model which does not take into account the Asia-Pacific region” in the context of today’s business globalization. Although the region’s languages and cultures are often seen to impose an apparent and immediate barrier to the rest of the world, I am under the impression that innovation and creativity which proved successful in other markets are more than likely to succeed in this region as well.

As we enter a mature globalization cycle, we may realize that the real issues are not about overcoming differences between cultures and languages but about creating solutions which attract human curiosity and imagination on a universal basis. The hard times we are going through may just turn out to provide the impetus needed to drive more innovation and creativity to produce efficient and human-friendly solutions. For me one challenge of globalization is how to produce universally attractive innovation and then to fine-tune it for each market using experienced localization specialists and other partners with local knowledge and expertise in a given field.

- Minako O’Hagan