At the same time, supply-side consolidation continued apace, culminating with the announcement of SDL's merger with Alpnet just after Christmas. We take a close look at one of the more spectacular of the year's buy-outs in interviews with the CEOs of Bowne and their new partner Mendez, following the disbanding of Lernout & Hauspie.

Global content management

Last year, the now-unstoppable trend of forging partnerships between localization suppliers and technology developers was mostly focused on ensuring comprehensive multilingual content management services to address a more stable web marketplace. You will be able to read a useful backgrounder on the whole topic of content globalization management from our new technology editor Pierre Cadieux, who argues that integrating CGM will be critical to the success of multilingual business in the near future.

The year also included at least one new alliance involving translation technology and localization services, as the current cycle of memory technology matures and providers seek to position themselves for survival. On the interesting question of maturing technology and what to do with it, we asked Lionbridge's CTO to explain the thinking behind the firm's November 2001 decision to deliver the source code of their ForeignDesk translation memory system to the Open Source community. This would have the effect of enabling developers to extend and enrich the functionality of the software for their own requirements—and could of course involve trying to productize a new version of the original.

Mature memories

There are certainly strategic rather than purely philanthropic reasons behind this decision. But in a time of fast-changing technology, the opportunity for a broader community to contribute to localization technology development is an innovation that may have a ripple effect throughout the market. It will enable localization users to absorb the technology more easily into their own IT processes and customize it for their specific needs. Which will in turn eliminate some of the proprietary mystique of translation memory technology, and encourage wider awareness of its scope and potential in a broader range of companies large and small.

With this democratization of the technology, localization suppliers will have to innovate yet again to differentiate themselves and add value to the their clients' business. And companies owning large translation memory databases will have to start thinking in terms of how to leverage this content as a genuine asset. We plan to keep you posted about emerging ideas on how to leverage such assets and make them answerable to business imperatives of gaining a return on investments.

Culture clubbing

The awesome singularity of September the 11th, on the other hand, seems to have had little structural impact as far as we can tell on the localization business: reports from the Middle East suggest that any drop in business had already kicked in before the change in geo-cultural attitudes occasioned by the event. And the momentary promise of sustainable new multilingual opportunities—unusual new language pairs for new types of content—probably faded rapidly from most localization supplier's development plans.

That said, the brave new world order gradually emerging from recent events will surely have highlighted not just the need for globalizing our concepts of communication—and an equally global monitoring of that communication—but also to the complexity of cultural values and their role in localizing meaning through language.

Industry insiders of course know all this, and guides to localization incessantly reiterate the importance of cultural awareness. Yet as they go global, businesses find it extremely hard to translate these concepts into actionable decisions about 'soft' products and services. Which suggests there is an opportunity here to pull the debate about 'cultural' adaptation in anything from document design, website design, personalized marketing and personalized CRM up to a more detailed, better-analyzed level of relevance—especially through such channels as business education, design for usability circuits, and basic technology training. One of the roles of the localization community, indeed, should be precisely to develop better documented knowledge about the return on investment from these more discreet forms of locale tailoring.

Now let's spin old Janus in the other direction—the immediate future. While everyone has been busy re-calculating business targets, scrutinizing their favorite crystal ball or simply skiing away their festive flab, LISA has been busy redesigning this very newsletter. Our objective is to better meet your needs as readers and our responsibility of providing a flow of relevant and innovative ideas and intelligence under the most appropriate reading conditions.

Twice a month

To meet the perceived need for a more sustained rhythm of publication, and enable us to share more timely articles in a more manageable volume, we shall be delivering a handy package of two or three articles every two weeks. This replaces the former model whereby you downloaded a substantial chunk of articles on a quarterly basis. We believe this new scheme offers advantages in terms of reactivity, quality and readability. And we hope you will find this a more effective way of keeping in touch with the localization community and interacting with the dynamic body of knowledge and best practice that it produces.

So in addition to the current articles you can find in this issue, we shall be looking in the weeks ahead at such topics as new technology products of interest to the industry, and how businesses are experimenting with new processes to boost quality and lower costs in the complex operation of localizing their products, starting with a profile of Medtronic's editing solution.

And for the those who relish a healthy dose of soul-searching, Don de Palma and Hans Fenstermacher will soon be sharing with us the ten things they hate most about the industry as a whole. You will discover that as Ogden Nash said, "any kiddy in school can love like a fool, but hating, my boy, is an art". We hope that the ensuing debate will stimulate responses that in time forge a more innovative, more ambitious and more all embracing localization industry. And we intend to design the content of this Newsletter around that objective.

Director's Letter