Most of this mammoth operation is being masterminded by governments in a fairly distributed institutional way, with special in-house teams or approved vendors appointed to do the work. Beyond a unified terminology manager, this will not be much of a high-tech project. But though it is usually referred to as a translation task, this is localization in the most refined sense.

National terminology has to be compiled through constant research and discussion with the support of legal experts in the country, and careful decisions about whether to neologize, borrow or find terms have to be taken. It would be interesting to know the total budget for this extraordinary operation; but the unlikelihood of another wave of new Euro-entrants, means that the client would not necessarily learn many lessons about localization ROI for the next time.

Supposing, however, the EC had put the whole job out to tender, seeking a single window onto the whole process via a competent vendor/consortium? It would have made a great test bed for pitching competing localization project management formats against very demanding specs. All quality controls and administrative issues could presumably have been handled through some local government link, law being a public rather than a private good. Yet it would probably have morphed into a management nightmare, as anyone who provides such services to governments knows.

On the positive side, productivity tools such as translation memory or MT would have been deployed once sufficient resource text had been hand-translated to gain leverage (which may not always happen under the existing approach). Any unexpected practical intellectual property issues would have been solved, building up a useful body of precedence in this domain. But above all, the principal client - the EC - would have been able to negotiate toughly on those two ancient yet primordial localization favorites - price and quality.

Like many localization projects in these uncertain times, that particular fantasy will remain firmly virtual. But the price wars are always with us. In a spirited illustration of this, Kevin Fountoukidis brings us the down and dirty from Poland on the way price, ROI and quality interact in the East/Central European language marketplace he knows well. He suggests the days of 'cheap' services are numbered, and that despite 'dumping' practices, this region will inevitably develop a more quality-driven localization culture.

On a quite separate topic, Russia-based Leonid Glazytchev argues for a reclassification of vendors (premium content), now that the death of distance and other factors have consigned the old Multiple versus Single Language Vendor configuration to the garbage can of history. He replaces it with a geography of Single or Multiple Office players, where the differentiating emphasis is on boutique-type skills rather than purely 'language prosecution' networks.

And now that flashier mobile services are being rolled out in Europe and elsewhere this season, Shailendra Musale, based in Finland, reviews a comprehensive new guide to mobile location services, identifying those areas where internationalization and localization will increasingly enter into the quality of the always-on mobile service offerings.

To end, our crossing-the-cultural-chasm hiccup of the week, as seen on a Canal+ TV report of the Iraq operation… One member of the coalition forces says of a group of insistent prisoners, "They say they want to pee," while his colleague says, "No, they want to pray."

Good reading!

- Andrew Joscelyne