Editorial

There was a lot of buzz about market size at the recent LISA Global Strategies Summit in New York City. How big is the current market? How much and how fast will it grow? This question of course is always phrased in terms of dollars – interestingly enough, in politically incorrect U.S. dollars. Is it an $8B business? Is it an $18B business? How about $43.8B? Is that why the likes of HP and IBM have entered the ring? Do they know something that we don't know – and if they do – why won't they share it with the rest of us?

No one knows how big this market is.

Okay, since you all insist on knowing, as your LISA Chief Strategist, I am forced to tell you the secret answer. Ready? Here it is: No one knows how big this market is. Anyone who says they do know is wrong or worse. The most accurate answer is reminiscent of Douglas Adams' description of space in The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy: "Space is big? Really big, you just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." That's the way I feel – and others in our industry feel – about the localization opportunity. It's big, really big. Here's why:

English is becoming marginalized … it will be relegated to an interchange format rather than a lingua franca.

We are in the early stages of an unprecedented socioeconomic phenomenon. Well, maybe not entirely unprecedented – there was the Phoenician maritime trading surge in the first millennium BC – but things are moving and shaking linguistically. As my colleague and fellow LISA Member Donald Barabé put it recently, "It is just like the Ptolemaic system, with English is currently in the center of the linguistic universe. Before that, it was French and before that it was Latin." It's not that English is spoken by the most people – that honor currently goes to Chinese – it's that English is currently at the center and will remain so for some time. In fact, it may never be displaced. But here's what's new: English is becoming marginalized; over time (I predict) it will be relegated to a worldwide interchange format rather than a lingua franca. Here's what I mean:

Money talks. And it uses the local tongue.

Advances in technology have made it possible for emerging countries like China and India and many others to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing. (Check out the cover article for the June 26th issue of TIME magazine, entitled India Inc., for an eye-opener). As a direct result of this eruption, the middle classes of those countries are blossoming – they have more money and consequently more power. And they are using that power. Governments around the globe are legislating policies that ensure that their citizens have access to products and services that reflect their own national languages and cultures and business laws, not someone else’s, i.e., not English. Sure, many of them can speak English, but the point is: they no longer have to. Money talks. And it uses the local tongue.

Speaking of money, what does all this have to do with the size of the localization industry opportunity? Well, as the world becomes flatter (thank you, Thomas Friedman!), there is an imperative emerging. It is no longer a matter of deciding whether to increase one's global business revenue by investing in localization, it is a matter of survival. It is no longer a matter of deciding whether to make government documents or personal data available in multiple languages, it's the law. And it is no longer a matter of how big the opportunity is in dollars, even in U.S. dollars. Because it is not an "opportunity" any longer, it's a juggernaut. In my view, there are not enough localization specialists on the planet to meet the need. We could not – all of us – possibly ramp up fast enough to meet the demand. Is that big enough for you? It's plenty big enough for me.

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Even though many of our readers may be on vacation this month in the northern hemisphere, we have several important announcements.

First, how many times have you wished that you could access live salary data for Localization Project Managers and Software QA Engineers? Well, now you can. Take part in the LISA Globalization Professionals Salary Survey. Filling out the survey with information about what your organization pays its employees will take only a few minutes of your time, but you will then have on-line access to the latest data from the survey* at no cost. You will also receive a complimentary copy of the 2003 LISA Salary Survey results, a detailed 27-page report on globalization industry salaries worldwide. Click here to fill out the new survey today.

NOTE: Unlike “one-shot” surveys, the LISA Salary Survey is designed as an ongoing survey. The localization industry is changing so rapidly that LISA doesn't want to run a survey where the results will be out of date in six months. By allowing individuals to update their data at any time, we will make sure that users always have access to the latest real-time information on salaries around the world.

LISA Events is gearing up for its next two events. Plan to attend the Digital Economy Forum 2006 from October 5-7. In conjunction with the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland (USA), LISA will present strategies to enable SMEs to compete successfully in the global market place. In November, join us for the annual LISA Forum Europe in Warsaw, Poland when our theme will be Europe’s Eastern Frontier: Doing Business in an Expanding Europe. If you are conducting business in Central or Eastern Europe, join LISA today and qualify for some very special deals on Forum attendance, LISA Skills Workshops and LISA Publications.

LISA Partners will be busy this fall as well. Content Management Professionals (CM Pros) will host Content Management and the World Enterprise on November 27 (co-located with the Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies) in Boston (USA). Register by September 30, 2006 and receive a free one-year membership to CM pros.

Nicholas Negroponte, Chairman of One Laptop per Child and Chairman Emeritus of the MIT Media Laboratory, will be giving the keynote address entitled, “One Laptop per Child – $100 Laptop,” at The Thirtieth Internationalization & Unicode Conference (IUC) in Washington, D.C. (USA) on November 15-17.

In the world of standards, OSCAR reports that a new version of GMX-V that incorporates significant feedback has been posted at http://www.lisa.org/standards/gmx/. A demo file will be created to allow you to actually try out GMX-V to compare it to other tools. OSCAR is asking all tools developers to run the test file against their own tools, so that it can compare the results of commercial tools with GMX-V. Please submit your results/questions to gmxComments@lisa.org.

For those of you who want to review/implement the recently enacted quality standard EN 15038 for Europe, it is in the process of being translated and published through your local standardization body (DIN in Germany, BSI in the U.K., AENOR in Spain, AFNOR in France, UNI in Italy, etc.). It is priced around 30 euros and has been in effect since mid-May. For more details, read The EN-15038 European Quality Standard for Translation Services: What’s Behind It?.

If you’re hunting for best practices for XML internationalization, check out http://www.w3.org/International/its/techniques/its-techniques.html.

And just to keep us humble and on our toes, check out the globalization-related woes of Coke and Pepsi in India this month. As one writer pointed out, “In short, two of the world's biggest brand names failed to do what they do best: pitch the virtues of their products directly to their customers.” An American public relations consultant described the situation this way, "They underestimated their own importance. Much more than companies, they are symbols of the West. They don't realize how powerful that is."

That’s all for this month. Looking forward to seeing many of you in Maryland and Warsaw!