Post-Event Report: The 29th Internationalization & Unicode Conference

Thomas Emerson, Basis Technology

The first keynote, “Going Global with a Search Engine,” was by Tuoc Luong, Executive Vice President of Engineering & Technology at Ask.com. Luong discussed the approach and issues Ask.com faced when internationalizing their core (Teoma-based) platform. He repeatedly emphasized that "internationalization is just good software design." Ask.com made a decision early on in the internationalization effort to fork the code base and remerge after support for Japanese (their first non-western target market) was complete. The effort spent during the up merge almost dwarfed the entire internationalization effort, however! "A pencil is cheaper than an eraser," Luong said, indicating again that it is better to design up front for international markets than it is to add support later. Luong also discussed the logistical issues of managing and communicating with different teams in radically different time zones and language capabilities. This underlined the ever-present project management challenges in any non-trivial localization or internationalization effort.

The vendor exhibition was held on the first full day of the conference and was followed by a nicely catered reception where thirteen exhibitors presented their products and services, including: localization tools and services (Translations.com, Idiom Technologies), text manipulation and input utilities (PDFlib Gmbh, Tavultesoft, IBM/ICU), search systems and linguistic technologies (Business Search Technologies, Basis Technology Corp.), and industry publishers and organizations like GALA, LISA and Multilingual Computing. Google and Microsoft also had booths targeted at recruitment, though Google also showed Google Earth running on an iMac, which was a real attention getter.

The second day opened with an interesting keynote by Colonel Daniel Scott, Assistant Commandant of the Defense Language Institute (DLI) Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California, and continued with a plenary presentation by Charles Bigelow, Vice President, Bigelow & Holmes Inc. Col. Scott talked about the growing recognition within the US Government, and in particular within the military, for foreign language education. He briefly touched on President Bush's recent US$114 million program for foreign language programs in elementary and secondary education in the United States, particularly in "rarely taught" languages like Mandarin Chinese and Arabic. However, the core of Col. Scott's talk centered on the Defense Department's foreign language programs for the next several years, and how the DLI is changing to meet those requirements. The DoD would like 80% of officers to have competency in a second language and 100% of General officers to be fluent in a second language. Chinese, Arabic and Persian were the three languages that Col. Scott repeatedly emphasized, though he despaired at the age of some of the DLI's training materials: the Persian information mentions the late Shah's father!

The technical program over the two days was nicely varied and the sessions appeared to be well attended across the board. Topics covered were both web and traditional application globalization issues, as well as international features in particular applications and operating systems/environments.

IUC 29 was certainly the most successful edition of this long running series. The next conference will be held in Washington, D.C. on November 15-17, 2006. For more information, visit www.unicodeconference.org.

Thomas Emerson is a Software Architect at Basis Technology Corp. He works on linguistic analysis software for Chinese and Korean.