Localization Industry to address challenges in Europe

Dublin, Ireland May 2^nd, 2002 - Faced with growing demand, European experts in localization will meet in Ireland to discuss recent advances in their industry, including the development of new standards. Internationalization of the Web and e-commerce has progressed, and there are new script implementations, and enhanced application development platforms and international toolkits to consider. The Unicode Consortium released the latest update of its character standard earlier this month, bringing it closer to its goal of coverage for all of the world's living languages.

Demand for localization is increasing in many industries throughout multilingual Europe and especially for e-commerce. According to IDC "demographics of the web, and hence e-commerce, are shifting away from the U. S. and away from English".

To address these challenges, the Unicode Consortium is hosting its 21st international conference in Dublin, May 14-17. The keynote speaker, Reinhard Schäler, will discuss the new European Localisation Exchange Centre (ELECT) and its mission of informing the multilingual and multicultural digital content industries in Europe on best practices. Mr. Schäler is the Director, Localisation Research Centre, at the University of Limerick, Ireland. He will also moderate a panel on XLIFF, a new XML-based localization standard that is featured at this conference. A workshop on "Standards in Localization" is also being hosted by the Localisation Research Centre at the conference site.

A second keynote by industry leader, Richard Ishida of Xerox, will speak to the managers, product planners and designers in the audience about overcoming the challenges in developing international user information so that products can be successful globally.

Ireland was chosen as the conference site for its easy access by Europeans and its strong concentration of localization industry professionals. The conference also offers tutorials and sessions for beginners. The complete program and speaker biographies and -- registration information -- is at http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc21.

The Unicode Standard has become the foundation for all modern text processing. The standard brings dramatic cost reductions to applications and enables the exchange of text in languages all over the world.

The conference sponsors are:

Agfa Monotype Corporation

Basis Technology Corporation

Lionbridge

Localisation Research Centre

Microsoft Corporation

Reuters Ltd

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

THE UNICODE CONSORTIUM

The Unicode Consortium was founded as a non-profit organization in 1991. It is dedicated to the development, maintenance and promotion of The Unicode Standard, a worldwide character encoding. The Unicode Standard encodes the characters of the world's principal scripts and languages, and is code-for-code identical to the ISO/IEC 10646 standard. In addition to cooperating with ISO on the future development of ISO/IEC 10646, the Consortium is responsible for providing character properties and algorithms for use in implementations.

The membership of the Unicode Consortium includes computer corporations, governments, software producers, database vendors, research institutions, international agencies and various user groups listed at http://www.unicode.org/unicode/consortium/memblogo.html.

Further information on the Unicode Standard is available at http://www.unicode.org.