I am delighted to have Terrie Lloyd on board to provide us with expert advice on Japan, drawing on his wealth of experience as a successful Kiwi entrepreneur. I met Terrie when he was a featured speaker at a Japan seminar a few years ago in Wellington, New Zealand. He is a frequent presenter at such public seminars and is a trustworthy source of business knowledge concerning Japan. Terrie’s article (premium content) provides insights into the still not-well-understood dimensions of foreign SMEs establishing a presence in Japan.

The counterparts to this article are the contributions by John White (premium content) and Bonnie Girard (premium content) on the Chinese market. John’s expertise is in globalization of technology products, and Bonnie is a China consultant who has a long association with the country where she lived and worked for over one-and-a-half decades. While John’s article delves into the issues of protecting Intellectual Property in China (of particular interest to technology companies) and the cross-cultural definitions of trust within the business world, Bonnie discusses the basic building blocks of doing business there.

In relation to the topic of SMEs expanding into international markets, readers may be interested to check out the five-day training course organized by the eTTEC Project in Europe which starts next week. It is targeted at SMEs wishing to improve their international business expansion strategies and plans, and thanks to EU sponsorship, the fee is reduced. And don't miss out on the opportunity to attend the new client workshops on Global Content Management Systems and Machine Translation at the LISA Forum in Washington, D.C. later this year.

This edition of the Globalization Insider marks the last issue of the Asia-Pacific edition for 2003. To conclude the year, I thought it would be interesting to include a view from Australia on the localization scene down under. The contribution by Dr. James Hogan from Queensland University of Technology in Australia - the only LEIT (LISA Education Taskforce) member from Australasia - paints a picture of the emergence of the localization business in Australia and how localization training is on the rise. In fields such as localization, the partnership between academia and industry is particularly vital, as I am experiencing here in Dublin. In our next Asia-Pacific issue, we hope to cover the perspective from New Zealand, a country that is also undergoing the first phase of localization industry development, and thus experiencing an increasing need for localization expertise.

Some readers may recall that in my last editorial I had mentioned a forum on Harry Potter translators organized by the International Federation of Translators (FIT) at UNESCO. Although literary translation has so far not been part of what we call the GILT industry, some issues emanating from the Harry Potter translations highlight inherent problems with translation that also concern GILT. For example, the U.S. versions had to be adjusted to American English as opposed to U.K. English. Numerous culture-specific references needed to be massaged by the international group of translators who struggled, albeit in different ways, to retain the original “feel” conjured by these references. Among other things, the forum will be discussing the new globalized world of publishing fiction and serial pirate translations appearing all over the world because official translations take too long…Is this a sign that the simship model’s time has come for the international publishing business?

I hope you will enjoy this issue. Please feel free to write to us with your feedback, requests for topics you want us to cover or, indeed, your offer for a contribution of an article!

Best wishes,

Minako O’Hagan
LISA Asia-Pacific Editor
Dublin City University