System iNetwork

August 12, 2008

Products Speak Many Languages

If you clicked through to here from NEWS Daily looking for an encryption article, find it at "Encryption: Your Last Line of Defense."

Language, it seems, is no longer a barrier for many of the software vendors pursuing international customers.

"In a truly global marketplace, work can be done anywhere by anyone," says Bill Hunt, principal product manager for CA. "This means that there's a tremendous economic incentive to have work done by people whose first language may not be English."

CA is one of many System i companies pursuing language localization of software so that, for example, clients in Japan or France can use products written in their native tongue. "CA's commitment to localization is a reflection of our commitment to globalization," Hunt adds. "In the case of CA Plex and CA 2E, rapid application development environments that can both target IBM i, we work with several partners on product localization, language libraries, and so on, where we can deliver end applications using character sets from many languages." For CA Plex, the company offers a fully localized Japanese version in which the development interface is in Japanese. CA 2E is available in Japanese and French versions.

Both products contain numerous language libraries in which applications can be delivered to end users in languages such as Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, traditional and simplified Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss German, and Turkish.

ADC Austin, which has a technical alliance partnership with CA, develops its own core software and works with business partners in other countries to translate documentation and assist with the localization of solutions. "We are currently working with partners Dominion in Spain and Takaya in Japan to produce localized versions of our WebClient for CA Plex Ajax code generator," reports John Rhodes, principal architect and president. "We are also exploring Arabic as a possible localization candidate," he adds.

Going global is not without its glitches. "Our products are written in Java and interface with CA 2E and Plex, all of which have inherent support for national language localization as long as certain standards are followed," Rhodes says. "The Japanese version, in particular, has been challenging to develop. There are character set issues that are exacerbated by double byte representations, and we have to deal with a version of Windows and IBM OS that appear very different to the developers. We cannot read Japanese, so we need assistance from our partner. Simply using a keyboard set up for a different national language can be a challenge."

Rhodes reports that statistics regarding demand for web development tools caught the attention of ADC Austin early on. "Although English is the top Internet language, it still has only about 30 percent of the web users. Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese round out the top four and have a high percentage of users. Collectively these countries represent as large a market as English," he explains. "Although we are not ready to tackle Chinese yet, Spanish and Japanese localization seemed like a natural next step for us, especially since we have strong partners in these countries who are enthusiastic to assist us."

Michael Swindell, vice president of products for Codegear, which was acquired by Embarcadero Technologies at the end of June, says one way to avoid the technological challenges of native language versions of software is to think about internationalization up front. He recommends building English and global versions at the same time. "We do 100 percent of the development ourselves," he reports. "When we build our English products, they are internationally enabled right away."

Codegear offers database solutions in German, Japanese, and French and is pursuing Chinese and Russian versions. "We are seeing a growth in the software industry in these emerging markets," Swindell says. "We are really helping our customers expand their businesses into these growing economies."

More than 50 percent of Codegear’s business is international, and a good part of that is due to its translated products. "We are really pushing our database tools to get them out," Swindell explains. "The localized versions are the key."

Although Coglin Mills has a Japanese translation and a partial Spanish translation of its RODIN ETL tool, Alan Jordan, vice president of business development, reports that the high cost of developing product versions in other languages makes it somewhat prohibitive.

"We have customers in many different countries, and most of them are happy to work with the English language version," Jordan says. "Ours is a developer tool, so it is used primarily by IT people who are mostly somewhat fluent in English (or at least can read it well enough), and this is in our favor. Some other products where the user is not an IT professional would have a much stronger need for a translation than we do." Conversely, he adds, it is difficult to go after some markets without a translation.

"Recently a business partner in Latin America commented that some IT people prefer to work with documentation in English because they've found in the past that the translated version is either incomplete, incorrect, out of date, or just poorly done," Jordan says. RODIN is used to build and maintain data warehouses, data marts, and operational data stores on IBM i Power Systems servers.

Apatar’s data integration tools are used in the U.S. as well as Canada, Brazil, Germany, South Africa, Russia, China, India, and other countries, and Alex Khizhnyak, chief evangelist, expects the products to be translated to the languages of these nations soon. "In most cases, our partners in other countries aim to translate the tools themselves as a volunteer job. It's okay for us, as we are an open-source project foremost."

He sees the major obstacles to rewriting solutions in international languages as the lack of necessary information about the local markets, the lack of specialists capable of translating the technical expressions and terms, and the compatibility issues arising from local encoding systems and character sets. Apatar products include the desktop tool Apatar Open Source Data Integration and Apatar On-Demand, which is a web-hosted application for data synchronization.

Richard Milone, a CNX Corporation partner, reports that his company has not developed much of its software in other languages. "Our flagship product, Valence Web Application Framework for System i, is a web development framework and is actually used by many different countries in languages all over the world. Our customers develop their own applications with the language of their choice," he explains.

"Our other product, ATOMIC, is marketed only in North America. We do have some programs that work in Spanish and French within ATOMIC, but we normally only apply these modifications at special request," Milone adds. "Interestingly, it was customers themselves who volunteered to do the translations for us, which we then applied to the programming. So we didn't need to contract with anyone; it was the customers who offered the service for free to get the benefit of using the software."

Regardless of how and when vendors cross the language barrier, the future for this kind of development is bright. As CA's Hunt points out, "Language localization of software facilitates the distribution of work wherever it makes the most business sense."

--Vicki Hamende, application development & database editor

Posted by vhamende at August 12, 2008 7:57 AM