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21 Jun 2004
Review of 10th Annual IQPC Website Globalization Conference in San Francisco (i18n.com)
It has been a long time since I have corresponded with you from here at i18n.com. I want to provide everybody some information about a recent i18n/l10n conference I attended in San Francisco.
The 10th IQPC conference was sponsored as usual by Ion Global. Attendees and speakers comprised an interesting, informative, friendly and open mix of people.
The attendees came from a variety of types of companies, for the most part managers with the responsibility for providing localized content and product. Some were first timers and some were very experienced. Similarly, the presenters covered beginning and more experienced case studies and tools.
Most interesting to me was that each case is very different. The need to localize content is less a battle to internationalize in the old-school style way. By "old-school" I mean engineers pecking through source code in order to figure out if double byte characters will work properly or if the code is 8 bit clean. The attendees were for the most part non-engineers and whether they realized it or not, the applications they use are in fact able to handle fonts, Unicode, etc.
As a result, the biggest question on the attendees', presenters', and exhibitors' minds is process. How to get from her to there. It is rewarding to see the end-user side of the industry get to this stage after 10 years slogging in the trenches.
At the same time, it is somewhat disheartening to see that now processes need so much attention. This is a big problem in my opinion. With so many applications, standards, requirements and constraints on a company that needs to do localization, the choices about how to proceed are bewildering. A content management system is not the ultimate solution. A large or small localization vendor is not the ultimate solution. A set of fonts or pdf generating routines is not the ultimate solution.
Right now, the biggest issue I see is that the number of useful but partial solutions, tools, processes, etc, is bewildering, and it is not clear how clients' organizations should use them or integrate them into their own (possibly poorly described in the first place) processes. I would be interested to see an effort towards standardizing localization processes in order to make it easier for customers/clients to make a purchase decision with confidence.
I am sure next year's IQPC conference will be equally informative and a chance to explore localization issues with colleagues in friendly yet professional environment in beautiful San Francisco. Keep an eye on this space for announcements of time/place/etc.
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