Re: International business communications and Unicode

Hi Emma,

since you're a RMIT student (i guess the dreaded 108 building?)

one  very important aspect is location, specifically Australia.

a number of factors. Thinks differ between teh government and private sector, 
and more multilingual developemnt is occuring withing the government and public 
sectors rather than private.

Although current government tendering policies prevent appropriate leveraging of 
tarnslation technologies.

There is a vacuum of multilingual web developers in australia, and same major 
examples of badly designed sights.

language technology is less well undeerstaood, and as your own experience shows 
is not well known in australia. This is especially true in teh translation 
industry, where the use of langauge technologies is rather piecemeal at best, or 
non existant at worst.

But its best not to go into the long term politics within the translation 
community.

Very few reviews and reports have been publish on government multilingual web 
sites, teh only one i can think of off hand is teh review of the "Better Healtgh 
Channel" which identified major methodological and project conception flaws int 
he development of the site.

you might want to look at some of the papers form teh open road conference, esp 
presentations form the better health channel, NSW health Dept., AQIS , etc.

at http://www.openroad.net.au/world/

most government web sites in Australia use a resource level access model, 
requiring mediation.

very few universities in australia actually address language technology issues, 
teh only ones that come to mind were specifically designed for international 
chinese speaking students rather than for local australian students.

ciao

Andj.


Andrew Cunningham
Multilingual Technical Project Officer
Accessibility and Evaluation Unit, Vicnet
State Library of Victoria, 
Australia

andrewc@vicnet.net.au

Received on Thursday, 23 August 2001 07:32:41 UTC