A recent conversation with a hotel reservation clerk with Radisson Hotels offers an example. Here’s the conversation I had when calling the 800 number to ask about the Radisson Daugava. It’s a hotel in Riga, Latvia and the site of an upcoming conference on Localization in the Baltic countries.

“Could you give me some information about rates in your hotel in Latvia?”

I waited a few seconds then heard, “I’m sorry sir but we don’t have a hotel in Latvia.”

“There must be some mistake,” I said. ”I’m going to be staying there in less then a week. Check again.”

He came back on the line.

“We do have a hotel, however, in LaTiva, Riga LaTiva. Is that the one you are referring to?”

“LaTiva?” I said. “No, and it’s pronounced LATVIA! I’m LATVIAN and that is the pronunciation!”

“It’s LaTiva sir,” he said and then hung up.

Yeah, sure. LaTiva. That’s right next to LaPlaya, LaPaz, LaJolla, LaScala and LaCucaracha. My frostbitten homeland had moved south and now had a sunny, Latino-sounding name.

Yet Latvia has gone on trying to acquaint people with their country, to convince companies to outsource their IT work to Latvia, and to get companies to localize into Latvian and the other Baltic languages - Estonian and Lithuanian.

Although the Radisson reservation clerk may not know where Latvia is, top companies such as IBM, Microsoft, HP, British Airways, Nokia and Compaq certainly do. They have spent and are still spending millions for localized and translated software and documentation for the Baltic markets.

These countries all have growing internal markets; and they also provide a gateway for reaching the Russian market. For example, the Latvian port of Ventspils handles a great deal of Russia’s export of steel, fertilizer and petroleum.

Hanseatic League tables

These countries bordering the Baltic Sea hope the area will once again be as prosperous as it was were in medieval trading times, when the Hanseatic League governed Baltic trade. At a recent Baltic Development Forum, Carl Christian, Aegidius, General Manager of IBM Nordic, declared that the Baltics were indeed an attractive region for IT development. He claimed there is a direct correlation between IT growth (penetration, numbers of computers, Internet access, etc.) and economic growth.

The IT growth rate in the Baltic’s is about 12% per annum. The three Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) have a combined population of some 10,000 IT workers, and there are an estimated 700,000 PCs in the three countries. In Estonia, 15% of the population uses cell phones and 250,000 are registered Internet users. In Latvia there are 150,000 registered users, and another 150,000 in Lithuania.

Compaq has been working closely with Microsoft in promoting IT in the Baltics, working with government and the telecommunications industry to boost e-commerce and e-government. It looks as though the two of them have held some sort of conference every week in the region, particularly on e-commerce. To quote Bo Kruse, Microsoft’s energetic, if not visionary director for the Baltics, “Countries who fail to bring their citizens into the 21st century will face much harder economic challenges than ever before. The world is changing so fast that it is almost impossible to stay competitive without a trained and skilled labor force. And there’s no doubt that if you are not on the Internet, you are not world-competitive.”

Vote of confidence

The Baltics received a much-needed vote of confidence this year from Microsoft when they undertook the largest localization project ever in the region. According to Daiga Jace, Microsoft’s Marketing Manager for the Baltic region, working at Microsoft Latvia (www.microsoft.lv), “The decision to localize Office XP for Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian markets proves that Microsoft believes in these countries. We are ready to commit ourselves to large IT projects in the Baltic region.” In spite of extensive software piracy, Office XP came onto the Baltic markets about four years ahead of schedule.

To complement the localization effort, Microsoft had the biggest-ever product launch in the Baltic region, with widespread advertising, PR campaigns and a number of road shows. (See the three versions of the advertisement used in each of the Baltics) The tag line for Latvia is ‘more productive, more Latvian, and more accessible’.

While there may a recession in the global localization industry, with certain companies cutting back on budgets for even major languages, some of the world’s leading firms have gone ahead with Baltic language localization for countries with less mainstream languages with a combined population of only 8 million. These countries are proud, if not defiant, to insist on the use of their very old languages in a digital environment, and although most educated Baltic citizens speak fluent English and Russian, they want to be educated and have products addressed to them in their native languages.

From bi- to mono

The three Baltic states developed written forms of their rich historical, if not ancient languages, in the late 1800’s. But when the Russians occupied the region, Russian became the obligatory language and native languages were officially relegated to the archives, until the Soviet Union imploded. Suddenly there was a renewed burst of interest in native language usage. All the bilingual signs featuring the Russian language were removed and replaced with native language content. In Latvia alone, 70,000 bilingual road signs were replaced.

Today, the older Russian population in all three Baltic states feels marginalized in the wake of new native language laws, and the younger generation of ethnic Russians is coming to realize that their future lies in mastering the native languages. It would be commercial suicide for any Western company to try to sell a product or service in the Baltics using just Russian.

English and German are now being studied in earnest; both to gain commercial advantage in this environment and out of pride in their language abilities. Air Baltic had to develop crash courses in English when it started connecting with the rest of Europe. Its first flight attendants spoke Baltic languages and Russian, leaving European passengers without an effective lingua franca for communication.

Western marketers now realize that English or another Western European language is simply not enough to reach the consumer. All Baltic countries are on track to join the European Union, and hope that doing so will provide the same economic boost that pushed Ireland into the premier IT league in the 1990s. One of the critical reasons why Ireland developed its localization industry was because it became a member of the European Union. It would not be surprising to see the Baltics develop a localization industry as vibrant as that found in Ireland. Ironically, Ireland is resisting the extension of the EU membership to Baltic countries.

Back to the beginnings

I remember a frantic call from Cable and Wireless, the telecoms firm, in 1993. They wanted to present a proposal to the Latvian government to buy out the country’s telecommunications system. Coca Cola was writing contracts with bottlers in all the Baltic States and needed translation immediately. Amoco Oil wanted to drill for oil off the Latvian coast and needed enormous amounts of content translated. RG Energy wanted to privatize Talinn Estonia’s energy system. And Williams Pipelines wanted to improve Lithuania’s largest oil refinery.

A whole army of Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes and Germans descended on the Baltics with hundreds of new business proposals, ranging from shopping centers to pulp and paper plants. When it came to the question of communication, the problem wasn’t a lack of translators for the Baltic languages: they simply didn’t have the tools to do the work quick enough.

Because of this, the work was carried out in countries where Baltic speakers could be found and had the computing tools to do the work. Just a few years before this, the total population of privately-owned computers in Latvia amounted to… three Macs! Andrej Vasiljevs, CEO of Tilde, recalls someone who brought an IBM to Latvia at this period, and managed to purchase a seaside mansion on the proceeds.

Tilde goes for tools

But there were problems with doing the work outside of the Baltics. The influx of businesses and opportunities from the West was creating a whole new vocabulary. Words were being invented to describe situations that has not previously existed. Under communism there was no such concepts as marketing, leasing, licensing, partnering, fulfillment, antifreeze, brokers, hatchback, coupes, roadsters, and hardtop. These and hundreds more words were borrowed and then repackaged into the three Baltic languages.

It was hard for anyone not living in this rapidly evolving language environment to handle the continual changes and additions. Tools were needed and Tilde was one of the pioneers that responded to the call.

Founded in 1991, the firm started by providing Baltic language fonts to anyone who needed them. More recently, it has become a full scale translation and localization supplier. Their dynamic approach inspired Baltic language-lovers to ask a vital question: As new IT technology transforms the way the world does business and communicates, will there be a place for our languages? Will the computer systems using our languages work as fully and richly as those in larger national markets?”

Tilde’s products now cover not only fonts, but also Baltic language support, proofing tools, electronic dictionaries, a multimedia encyclopedia and Web TV. It considers itself the major font localization and distribution center for the Baltics, designing localized versions of Roman fonts for Eastern and Central European languages, and Cyrillic for the Turkic language groups. Microsoft licenses its software for inclusion in the Latvian version of MS Office, and Tilde is also the localization partner for Bitstream.

In addition to the work Tilde does for Microsoft, their clients include Nokia, Ericsson, Xerox, Hewlett Packard, Navison, Lotus and suppliers such as Berlitz GlobalNet and the erstwhile L&H. Their first big breakthrough came in 1994 when they localized the IBM AS 400 system into the Baltic languages. Veikoo Grohn, Project Manager of IBM NLSC Finland and the Baltics, says of Tilde’s work: “It is IBM’s global policy to provide localized products to our customers worldwide. IBM National Language Support Center Finland (NLSC) and the Baltics has found that Tilde is a reliable partner capable of dealing with large-scale, complex projects.”

Vide Infra looking up

Since few language vendors have genuine capabilities in the Baltic languages, other suppliers have also turned to Tilde. Andrius Katilius, Translation manager for INTER Technical Translations, notes that “Tilde is very well-organized. This has become especially clear to us now, when we are working in cooperation with them on a large Ericsson project for Berlitz Translation Services AS Norway.’

But Tilde is not the only language services company making headway in the Baltics. The Vide Infra Grupa has hit the headlines as the first Latvian Internet company to attract venture capital from Lohmus Haavel and Viisemann, the Estonian investment bank. It then secured a 16 language project from British Airways. The project was an Internet-based extranet system linking the airline and travel agencies together, deployed in 16 Eastern European and Eastern Mediterranean countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Yugoslavia, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Cyprus, Russia, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Turkey and Ukraine).

According to Greg Tye, British Airways regional marketing manger, the aim of the project was to deliver effective and versatile information about British Airways to everyone willing to book a flight via travel agencies. According to Tye, “the new extranet system should simplify daily operations of travel agents and offer a much wider choice of opportunities to British Airways passengers.” The Vide Infra Grupa netted the assignment because of British Airways was particularly satisfied with the smaller system they had set up in Latvia.

What next?

The man who put Microsoft’s Baltic localization strategy into high gear left the region for a new position on December 1, 2001. But before leaving, Bo Kruse gave an extensive interview with Dienas Biznes, the leading Latvian business daily about the future. He noted that Microsoft’s business has developed much faster than he had anticipated; he was extremely pleased with Tilde’s work in localizing their software, and forecast that e-government will be a major growth area in the future. So that original localization effort was well worth the investment. He notes that Microsoft will have a system in place where you can travel the globe and with the use of your own password can access localized versions of Windows.

John Freivalds is US Representative for the Latvian Development Agency. You can reach him at jfa@att.net.