In this Asia-Pacific focus issue, we bring together three articles and one profile. Readers may have heard that The Economist has recently gone Japanese. After several attempts in the past, the Economist Japanese online service is now up and running. We interviewed the President & CEO of EIS, a young Japanese firm that has successfully bid for the partnership to bring the magazine to Japanese readers. They admit that their most challenging task in this project is to turn the somewhat high-brow Economist English into business Japanese. This is an example of top-quality translation which can only be produced by expert human translators. By contrast, the other end of the market can be satisfied with even minimal quality translation in return for speed, convenience and low cost, using MT. Furthermore, the MT industry has shown great agility in catering to new communications environments. For example, although they began with with mainframe computers, MT platforms have since migrated to PC, Internet/Web and are now embracing mobile phones and PDAs. The second article MobileMT Market in Japan is the market watch for emerging MT applications specifically designed for mobile communication devices. These days, just telephoning is only one aspect of mobile phones, particularly since the availability of IP connections. A number of special services using MobileMT are available for the 2002 FIFA World Cup currently being held in Korea and Japan. It seems that MT is developing a niche market by providing translation functionality as part of a given communication device. Can we ever make human-based services available in the same way?

Our LISA profile introduces a pre-eminent Japanese conference interpreter who has worked at nine G8 summits. Based on his wealth of experience, this expert communicator shares his insights into the world of interpreting and communicating across languages and cultures as well as the importance of being funny! Last but not least Building Cultural Diversity into the Development of Multilingual Applications introduces the background to the IBM software process paradigm by addressing a wide range of culturalization issues which need to be considered in product globalization and localization. The comprehensive reference list attached to the article is particularly valuable for researchers investigating this field. The article illustrates multidimensional aspects involved in designing products for worldwide markets. Whether or not our thinking is conditioned by our language, as per the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, some globalization and localization tasks touch on the very deep aspect of differences between languages and cultures implicit and explicit in the design of the product.

Hope you will enjoy this issue and that you will let us have your feedback and comments - it's the only way to improve ourselves and serve your needs better.