Additionally, on Tuesday November 4th in Shanghai the LISA and Hewlett Packard China will be hosting a CHINA FOCUS 2004 networking meeting and dinner exclusively for LISA members. For more information about CHINA FOCUS 2004 please contact the LISA Director, Mike Anobile, at mike&#64lisa.org.

Descriptions of each workshop and links to more information are included below.

---

Developing Global J2EE Applications

Friday, September 12 (Boston)

During the last two years, enterprises have been aggressively seeking standardization across platforms, software and hardware. Integration as the predominant strategy comes as an answer to the seemingly paradoxical requirements a growing number of companies need to address: manage increasingly individualized and complex business transactions while reducing costs and lowering response times to their customers, suppliers and employees.

Two competing platforms have emerged as the standards for enterprise application development: Microsoft's .NET and Sun's Java/J2EE. A recent survey from Evans Data Corporation found that 100% of industry IT executives are planning to work with one or both technologies within the next two years.

Another undeniable trend is the increasing need for global applications. With organizations expanding geographically, integration must reach beyond hardware platforms and programming languages to include the cultural and linguistic variations of countries and regions. Applications must be built "for the world" as companies cannot afford to add significant development efforts every time they open a new market.

Both .NET and J2EE integrate globalization and provide the necessary buildstones to develop truly global applications, but a crucial question remains: are your developers aware of the need and are they effectively using the tools at their disposal?

Faced with complex architectures and steep learning curves, US-centric development teams may easily overlook, forget or abandon requirements that seem irrelevant to quickly launch an application in North America. Yet, fixing internationalization issues after the core architectures and development standards have been laid out can be a daunting task and can deprive a company from much needed multinational customers and lucrative international markets.

Focused on Sun's Java/J2EE platform, this workshop first sets out to indentify and explain the critical concepts underlying a truly global application. Once this foundation has been established, the attention is centered successively on the Java language, the user interfaces, and finally the complete J2EE platform, to describe in detail and with examples the various techniques and mechanisms that must imperatively become part of the global developer's toolkit.

---

Managing Localization Projects

Friday, September 12, 2003 (Boston)

"Measure twice, cut once" is an American English idiom referring to the need for careful planning if one wishes to reduce waste and achieve maximum results – in other words, careful planning smoothes execution and maximizes ROI. The management aspects of localization and internationalization projects are critical not only to the success of the project, but also to the success of the corporate objective which necessitated the project; yet localization and internationalization initiatives rarely get the management attention they need and deserve.

---

Internationalization & Localization Testing
Successfully testing multilingual software and Web sites

Wednesday, September 17, 2003 (Boston) &
Wednesday, November 5, 2003 (Shanghai)

Do you want to create a multilingual testing capacity in your organization? Do you want to offer multilingual testing services to your customers? Do you want to globalise your existing monolingual test organization?

This workshop teaches the fundamentals of internationalization and localization testing. Both management and technical aspects are covered in a practical, pragmatic manner. Numerous examples and actual samples of test plans, test cases and test strategies are provided.

This workshop will show you how to test in all target languages and on all target platforms in a cost effective manner. You will learn how to set up a testing organization along with associated workflow, planning and management structures. You will learn how to leverage industry best practices, methods, tools and techniques. You will learn what to test and how to test it. This knowledge will be ready-to-use the very next day!

---

Automating Localization Workflow:
Available Systems and How They Compare

Wednesday, September 17, 2003 (Boston) &
Thursday, November 6, 2003 (Shanghai)

Do you feel the need for more automation in the localization process? Would you like documents (or Web content) requiring translation to be automatically routed from customer to translation vendor, and back? Would you like to automate many of the steps of the localization process itself?

Such automation capabilities exist today to some degree in various systems of various price/capability ranges. Some are large "globalization management systems" (GMS), others are less expensive "translation management systems" (TMS), and there are several flavours in between.

In order to understand and compare such different systems with disparate terminology, a generic model of automated localization workflow is described. A practical scenario is demonstrated by animating the model. The model is also used to visualize what industry standards are applicable and where (in the localization process) they apply: TMX, TBX, XLIFF, Translation Web Services, WfMC, JSR 170, SAE J2450, etc.

With the model well understood, a detailed evaluation framework is presented and applied to the available commercial systems. The evaluation framework covers a wide range of issues, both technical and business, relating to supported formats, translation tools, company viability, etc. The workshop concludes with an insightful discussion of the most significant, topical and current issues related to automating localization workflow.

Systems covered include TRADOS GXT, SDLWorkFlow™, STAR Proactive 2.0, GlobalSight System4, IDIOM WorldServer™, LTC Organizer and others.

This workshop will help you determine whether you should consider purchasing such a system and, if so, what system is the best for your needs.

---

Unicode and Asian Character Sets:
Sets Establishing The Proper Foundation For Your Global Product

Thursday, September 18, 2003 (Boston) &
Thursday, November 6, 2003 (Shanghai)

If you are thinking about internationalising your product, in order to produce localised versions for Asia or the rest of the world, your first decision will be about how to represent your data. Will you use Unicode? or local character sets? or both? What laws can influence your decision? And what issues arise when using Unicode? Which encoding should you use? What are the benefits and costs? This uniquely unbiased workshop answers these questions by presenting Unicode's strong and weak points in a clear, incisive manner.

The workshop begins with a short history of character sets leading up to Unicode, from Unicode 1.0 to the current Unicode 4.0. The basic Unicode encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32), as well as other representations (CESU-8, SCSU, BOCU-1) are presented along with their pros and cons. Next, the four normalization forms and their applications are discussed. Unicode implementation issues are presented, notably concerning text manipulation and fonts. The next section is devoted entirely to database issues, from schema design to Unicode migration. The workshop then covers the latest Asian character sets: Korea's KS X 1001 versions, China's GB18030, Hong Kong's SCS and Japan's JIS X 0213 and their implications, both technical and legal (including conformance requirements).

This workshop will show you how to determine your data representation strategy and where Unicode fits in. You will learn what encoding to use, when to normalize, how to deal with fonts and databases and how to conform to the legal requirements in Asia. You will be ready to move, with confidence, to the next step in your internationalization project.

---

Defining Globalization Requirements:
Effectively Collect, Describe and Manage Multilingual Software Project Requirements

Thursday, September 18, 2003 (Boston) &
Tuesday, November 4, 2003 (Shanghai)

Have you ever had to take a product and adapt it to the world market? Have you ever had to gather multilingual software requirements? How can you describe requirements which vary for different locales? Have you ever had a tight budget forcing you to choose which features to implement and which features to defer? Did you face this problem on a global scale?

Requirements are a critical part of any software project and become extremely complex when simultaneously facing the needs of different locales. This workshop shows you how to systematically approach requirement management for software projects independent of your development process.

The workshop walks you through all phases of a requirement life cycle including elicitation, elaboration, workflow, prioritization, development, testing, deployment and support. Several real life examples from successful globalization projects are covered. You will take home tools, templates and techniques that you can use right away!

---

Creating International Software:
Preparing Software And Web Sites For Translation

Tuesday, November 4, 2003 (Shanghai)

Do you want to sell your software applications worldwide? Do you want your eBusiness Web site to be useable and effective globally? Internationalization will get you there faster and cheaper. Why? Because if you want to offer your product in 8,12 or 20 languages, internationalization is about doing things once rather than 8, 12 or 20 times.

Internationalization is the first step of a two-step process. It consists in generalizing your product to be as language-independent as required. The second step - localization - consists in adapting the product to meet the needs of different languages and cultures. Internationalization reduces cost and time-to-market by making localization easier and avoiding work duplication.

Unfortunately, the complexity of internationalization is often underestimated, resulting in missed deadlines and cost overruns. This complexity arises primarily from the large number of issues involved and that language issues are inherently pervasive: they can potentially affect every system, every component, every third-party tool, every line of code, every document, every help file, every test script, every business process involved in releasing your product to the world.

The workshop starts off precisely by looking at these numerous issues. The characteristics of different languages and writing systems, from Greek to Hebrew, Russian to Japanese, Swedish to Mongolian are presented visually, with special emphasis on Asian languages. Differences in cultural conventions are also highlighted. From one culture to another, anything can change.

Subsequent chapters include:

• a high-level executive summary: globalization concepts, business implications and ROI
• a visual model of globalization clarifying what internationalization really is
• internationalization management issues: reducing risk, reducing time-to-market
• development issues: locales, character sets, Unicode, input methods, fonts, multi-threading, etc.
• clear, simple examples illustrating not-so-simple internationalization problems
• testing internationalization: how to prepare testing scripts and what to test

This workshop will prepare you for all aspects of an internationalization project. You will know the issues, you will know the pitfalls and you will know the solutions. The workshop will provide you with a clear understanding of industry best practices, how to apply them and what their benefits are.

---

Creating Multilingual Web Sites:
Web internationalization and localization

Wednesday, November 5, 2003 (Shanghai)

Do you want to reach more people and generate more orders with a multilingual Web site? Do you want to help your customers set up their own multilingual Web site in a manner that will make localization easier? Do you want to increase your expertise in the quickly growing field of Web globalization?

This workshop focuses first on the language support features of the fundamental Web technologies: HTML, CSS, XML, XSL, etc. You will then learn how to apply these features to the design of both static ("brochureware") and transactional Web sites.

Are you sure your investment in translating Web pages has not been wasted? Learn how to ensure Web users find the pages available in their language. Learn also how to produce multilingual forms and how to retrieve multilingual data from them.

Learn by example. A fully functional internationalised Web site is built as the workshop evolves. This example site uses HTML forms and stores data in an Access database.

More complex presentation issues are also addressed; these include: Japanese ruby, Unicode and HTML bi-directional controls for Arabic and Hebrew, and multilingual fonts. What standards exist and to what extent they are currently supported by Internet Explorer and Netscape, will be covered.

The workshop also addresses the architecture of multilingual Web sites, i.e. how to organize HTML pages into a maintainable structure that supports the localization process. The workshop concludes with a brief overview of systems designed precisely for the purpose of automating entirely the Web localization process; the so-called Globalization Management Systems.