RE: question from novice

You might want to join the various globalization email lists on Yahoo Groups
and Unicode directly.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/l10n_project_management/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nelocsig/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/i18n-prog/
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/consortium/distlist.html

Post your 6 questions there and you will be surprised about the many replies
you will get (I am dave_i18n there). I could write a 500 page book based on
your questions and still not cover all. I will get back to you with some
basic answers later. These two sites managed by i18n-buddies of mine are
also excellent resources:

http://www.i18ngurus.com/
http://www.i18nguy.com/

You can contact me directly offlist as well. Cheers!

David Possin
Senior Globalization Consultant
www.Welocalize.com
241 East 4th St.
Frederick, MD 21701 USA
Phone: 301-668-0330
Toll-free: 800-370-9515
Fax: 301-668-0335

Integrated globalization solutions - faster time to market!


-----Original Message-----
From: Autrijus Tang [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2002 4:54 PM
To: liuman33
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: question from novice


On Sat, Aug 10, 2002 at 03:19:36PM -0400, liuman33 wrote:
> Dear Professor :

I wonder how many of us here are really professors. :-)

> For the Web to be truly "World-Wide", Internationalization (I18n) of Web
> Applications is necessary. That is, we need to make Web Applications
> available in as many natural languages used around the world as possible.
> *1.How can a company, who has branches around the world, benefit from
I18n?
> *2.For example, what should a company whose headquarters are in
> Canada do to "internalize" their Web Site for consumers in China
> with minimal expense and effort?
> *3.What steps should it take?
> *4.Does I18n automatically mean that all content needs to be reengineered?
> *5.What are the obstacles to I18n?
> *6.What is the role of Unicode in I18n?

For theoretical and standard-related discussions, one of the canonical
resources is http://www.w3.org/International/Activity.html -- The W3C
Internationalization Activity Statement.

A while ago, Brian King discussed the Mozilla I18N project in "Localising
the
Lizard" at
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mozilla/2000/11/10/localizing.html
which introduces http://MozillaTranslator.org/ and other related
technologies
in localizing a web application platform.

For Unicode's role, http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/principles.html
and its links (also backlinks) may provide technical grounds.

In http://www.autrijus.org/webl10n/ you may find my recent paper and slides
dealing with exactly these questions, although focusing on Perl-related
technologies.

Hope that helps,
/Autrijus/