Software firm attempts to topple Tower of Babel

WE HAD A very nice snack with Adam Asnes, president of Lingoport, and Gary Muddyman, MD of Conversis today.

Lingoport, based in Boulder, Colorado, and also with offices in Laramie, Wyoming, is on a whistle stop trip here to Old Blighty to explain why people need to get languages and culture right when they're globalising their software.

Asnes said that his firm realised four years back that it wasn't enough to just go steaming into foreign markets like China and Japan and expecting every bit of software to work. He said that his firm's VP of engineering came up with a software tool which would cut down the engineering costs and time taking and making software global by as much as 50 per cent.

This is based on a product Lingoport designed and UK firm Conversis is deploying in Europe which allows software to work with worldwide character set requirements and cultural formats.

Not every calendar is the same, let us never forget. There are at least six in use in India to our knowledge, one of which is the Gregorian version.

Practically, claimed Asnes, millions of lines of codes need to be sifted through to create a product that looks and feels right in the different countries of the world. Sometimes developers hard code stuff which don't really translate that well out of seven bit ASCII to a format with a different cultural bent.

Conversis is a UK business consultancy with clients in over a dozen countries and in 30 different markets, which is why the firms are teaming together. Conversis has marketing skills.

Its clients include Avaya, Canon, Epson, Ingersoll Rand, Pfizer, Heniz, BMW and Procter and Gamble. And Lingoport partners include Hewlett Packard, McAfee, Mysis, NCR, Riverdeep, and Travelport, as well as Indus International. Asnes told the INQ that embedded strings didn't necessarily work pretty well for foreign markets. Over 10,000 language sensitive formatting calls were found, for example, in US centric date formatting. The typical format for a date in the US is mm/dd/yyyy, and even just across the pond we use dd/mm/yyyy. How much more so if some Indian firm insists on using lakhs, crores and the Samvat era? The Indians are entitled, right? Indian culture invented the concept of zero, after all.

The brainwave, according to Asnes, is the Globalyzer internationalisation software, although he did agree most Brits used an "s" where most Americans used a "z", and vice versa. The Times of London tried to convert us all to the "z" (zed/zee) format in the 1920s, but this was a graft which refused to take.

Globalyzer, or Globalyser, supports Java, JSP, VB, C++, ASP, ASPX and HTML and lots more said Asnes. It goes places where .net hardly goes at all. µ

L'INQS
Lingoport
Conversis

See Also
The INQUIRER guide to marketing English
The INQUIRER guide to English English