RE: Business Case for i18n?

Absolutely.  And that, of course, is different from localization.  It would
be tough to convince any company to localize into Maori - despite Michka's
clever page, but all you need is a pie chart of world economic activity by
region (I refrain from attaching the one we have on our i18n pages) to
convince people of the importance of i18n even if their customers have to
know English to use it.

-Kim Peck


-----Original Message-----
From: Andrea Vine [mailto:avine@eng.sun.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2001 1:44 PM
To: www-international@w3.org
Cc: 'Al Gilman'
Subject: Re: Business Case for i18n?


Along that line, I'm wondering what folks are doing about their English
products.  I'm trying to convince folks that even though the product is in
English, it should not be designed only for the USA.  That is,
locale-related
formats should be dynamically selected, or user selectable, rather than in a
localizable resource file.  So for example someone using the English product
in,
say, Germany won't see their dates in MM/DD/YY format.

}sigh{
Andrea
iPlanet i18n architect

Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> 
> Al Gilman wrote on www-international@w3.org:
> > From time to time I get the opportunity to answer questions
> > like "Why mark
> > stuff as in Maori?  Almost nobody can read it, anyway."
> >
> >
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2001AprJun/thread.html#709
> >
> > In a rapid glance over the Internationalization home page at W3C I found
> > lots on 'how' to internationalize the Web but I didn't instantly stumble
> on
> > the story 'why' that I could cite.
> >
> > Some brief and pungent explanation of how "Without i18n, we can just
drop
> > the first two W's in WWW" would be handy for those of us conversing with
> > those who don't have the intercultural experience to "get it" without a
> > little light explanation.
> 
> You could use the old rhetoric trick of replying with a question.
> 
> Ask them the *same* question with "English" in place of "Maori".
> 
> Then make a pause to allow your audience to think "But this is not the
same
> thing!", then translate the question in Chinese, Hindi, Spanish,
Portuguese,
> Bengali...
> 
> While the audience is still shocked by your linguistic skills, start
writing
> on the blackboard  some statistics about this language (e.g.
> http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/top100.html).
> 
> First write the English figure, then add other languages and sum them up
as
> you write them.
> 
> I am sure that, while English is getting smaller and smaller compared to
the
> running total, your interlocutors will start feeling more and more
"Maori".
> 
> If you are holding a slide show or discussing by e-mail, you could use
> Michka Kaplan's "Everybody is Provincial" page as a written version of
> basically the same story:
> 
>         http://www.trigeminal.com/samples/provincial.html
> 
> _ Marco

Received on Wednesday, 13 June 2001 16:01:27 UTC