Designing International 
User Interfaces
Internationalization Workshop
Geneva, 2-3 December 1997
Twenty participants attended the Internationalization Workshop held before the LISA Forum in Geneva and presented by Richard Ishida, Globalization Consultant with Xerox Technical Limited. Following on from his highly successful Beijing Forum workgroup session, Richard gave an extensive overview of cultural and linguistic pitfalls in internationalizing and localizing user interfaces. Participant discussions led to the creation of a discussion group on internationalization guidelines.
 

Richard Ishida started by asking participants to state their reasons for coming to the workshop. Most members of the group were localization managers looking for information to present to their companies to convince them to internationalize products, or were looking for specific guidelines they could give to software developers. 

During the two sessions, Richard presented numerous examples of linguistic and cultural pitfalls, including such topics as numeric, date, time and currency formats, and various aspects of handling non-Latin scripts. Participants could present these often humorous examples to developers as a way to nudge them into considering internationalization issues. Several participants described their own success with giving presentations on internationalization to developers to raise awareness. 

Much of the Workshop discussion centered around getting localization and internationalization considerations addressed in companies. Several of the participants were from language services departments within software publishers, and were concerned with proving that internationalization was an issue worthy of attention - and resources. Most participants agreed that the impetus for this had to come from upper-level management; having internationalization integrated into the development process was the ideal.

Localization vendors are faced with similar problems, but often lack the influence with the client that a department within a publisher might have. The solution here was to utilize close contacts with repeat clients to educate them about internationalization.

The consensus was that convincing management to devote resources to internationalization often involved presenting worst-case scenarios about non-internationalized/localized products. Getting concrete figures and information was the problem.

Richard also outlined four main areas to consider when writing guidelines: coverage, level of detail, packaging (format), and presentation. He then described guidelines he had written for Rank Xerox, which were posted on the company's intranet for easy access.

The group decided to start a mailing list for LISA members to exchange resources on internationalization, and to compile basic guidelines based on their collective experience. The LISA Administration has established the following e-mail address for this purpose: 
i18n@lisa.org