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Software Localization and Internationalization: How and Why

Gregory M. Shreve, Ph.D.

Director, Institute for Applied Linguistics
Chair, Modern and Classical Language Studies
Kent State University

December 9, 2004

9:30-11:00 am
Presentation and Q&A

11:00-11:30 am
Reception

OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
Kilgour Auditorium
6565 Frantz Road
Dublin, OH 43017-3395

The growth of e-commerce and the Internet over the next decade will be driven by the expansion of regional markets. In order to reach potential consumers in these markets, companies will have to globalize their electronic documents. Web sites, software interfaces, product documentation and internal communications will be produced in the languages and cultural styles of an increasingly diverse and potentially rewarding international marketplace. Over the past decade, the language industry has emerged to provide these localization services. Localization is currently one of the fastest-growing sectors of the international economy.

Internationalization is a related engineering process whose objective is to optimize the design of products so that they can more easily be adapted for localized delivery. In an age when the fast, simultaneous release of multilingual documentation, web pages or software is a corporate objective, internationalization strategies are indispensable.

Gregory M. Shreve is Professor of Modern and Classical Language Studies (Applied Linguistics) and Founder / Director of the Institute for Applied Linguistics at Kent State University, the country's foremost university-based translator training program. Professor Shreve has broad research interests in translation theory and practice, computer-assisted translation, corpus linguistics, internationalization, software localization and language informatics. Dr. Shreve's presentation will expand on the topics of localization and internationalization.

Gregory Shreve received his doctorate in anthropology from Ohio State University and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Shreve is the general editor of the monograph series, Translation Studies, and co-author of several influential books and anthologies on translation studies including Translation as Text with Albrecht Neubert and Cognitive Processes in Translation and Interpreting with Joseph H. Danks. As a working member of the Text Encoding Initiative and the International Standards Organization United States Technical Advisory Group to Technical Committee 37, he was a major contributor to the development of current international standards for the markup and computerized exchange of multilingual terminological and textual information. He also was PI or Co-PI on two National Science Foundation grants to develop the National Science Digital Library.

Presentation resources

PDF version of the original announcement