Designing Systems for Secondary or Tertiary Markets
Intended Audience: |
Software Engineers, Systems Analysts, Marketers, Font
Designers, Site Coordinators, Technical Writers, Testers, Graphic
Designers, Web Administrators, Designers |
Session Level: |
Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced |
A common approach among U.S. companies in conducting
internationalization and localization is to prepare a product for
one target market (e.g., Japanese speakers in Japan) while ignoring
significant secondary and tertiary markets. Such secondary and
tertiary markets may include organizations in the United States
using multiple foreign languages, such as U.S.-based multinational
corporations or corporate offices, the U.S. government (with over
35,000 foreign language professionals), local and state
governments, libraries, universities, translation companies,
publishing houses, and international organizations. These markets
may also include foreign government offices working with multiple
languages, or offices of non-U.S. multi-national corporations in
other countries (e.g., a Japanese site in Latin America). Often,
there are different requirements, such as the desire to use an
interface different from the language in the application (e.g., an
English interface, but an ability to type Arabic documents), or to
use cultural symbols or time zones different from the language of
the native culture (e.g., using U.S. dollars with Korean). This
presentation discusses the size and location of such secondary and
tertiary markets, requirements for these markets, and
cost-efficient means of providing localization and support to meet
these additional requirements, and provides examples of successful
implementations. |