The theme of this Asia Pacific issue involves looking at localization from a new angle. The localization industry continues to evolve precisely because of its vital link with technology. This language and technology nexus now touches on a rapidly increasing number of business sectors. The film industry is one such sector that would benefit greatly by investing seriously in localization. The advent of DVDs has brought a merging of software localization and screen translation. It will be an interesting area for localizers to watch over the next few years.

Our first article, Training the Next Generation of Subtitlers (member content) by Dr. Sheng-Jie Chen, veteran subtitler of the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, talks about developing subtitler training to meet new market demands in Taiwan. Readers will learn that in contrast to the affluent image of the film industry and the huge salaries paid to the stars, there are often only meagre rewards for subtitlers who play an indispensable role in delivering films to the global marketplace. This directly affects the process of subtitling and its quality. Dr. Chen's article explains the cognitive process involved in film subtitling and then suggests specific training strategies to be based on it.

The second article, Middle Earth Poses Challenges to Japanese Subtitling by Minako O'Hagan, investigates the root cause of a subtitling problem that resulted in a petition criticizing the quality of the Japanese subtitles of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. This article draws comparisons between subtitling and localization in the search for quality assurance in film subtitling in Japan. In particular, it suggests a new approach based on collaborative subtitling with the support of technology.

While subtitling for commercial feature films is entirely dependent on human talents, real-time gisting translation is carried out almost entirely by translation engines. Within a very short time span, open-domain MT systems have become standard functionality on the Internet. These mostly free utilities have filled the gap left vacant by human-based language services.

Japan.internet.com's daily research news on 27 February, 2003 announced its survey results on the use of online translation sites, based on a sample of 300 Japanese Internet users, aged 20 to 60. The survey found that the most frequently used online translation sites were "Excite翻訳" and "Infoseek翻訳"both of which are powered by Amikai. Furthermore, 61% of the users of these sites had found the services to be user-friendly. So, Amikai is indeed a very popular translation engine, used mainly for translating between English and Japanese. Interestingly, Amikai MT applications take a different approach from most of their competitors, as explained by the firm's chief computational linguist, Dr. Raymond Flournoy, in our interview in this issue, Amikai: Best-of-Breed MT Engine. It is this Amikai innovation that seems to have won the users' votes.

Turning our eyes from technology to customers, we provide a summary of LISA's Global Strategy Summit, "Understanding Customer Requirements," held in San Francisco March 3-6. The very well-received forum provided more than 250 language professionals from 26 countries with a fresh focus on what customers want to achieve. Participants received an impassioned plea for consensus and cooperation between all players in the language business from government representatives, financiers, GILT industry leaders and educators. Those who missed the event can find out about it by reading the summary, Buzz from San Francisco.

Please feel free to drop us a line and let us hear your voice at editor@lisa.org!