Scene Setting and Keynote Address: 8:30AM - 10:30AM

8:30: Welcoming Remarks

8:45: Key Challenges in Software Internationalisation

James M. Hogan, Chris Ho-Stuart and Binh Pham

The trend toward globalisation of products and services has brought a strong economic imperative to the development of general methods for the localisation of software to different cultural environments. While ad hoc localisation may satisfy immediate commercial objectives, its extension to multiple locales is not cost-effective and an integrated strategy is needed. In this more sustainable approach of software internationalisation, the requirements of disparate markets are addressed during analysis and system design, with the architecture developed so that localisation to a particular environment is straightforward, and involves minimal re-engineering.

Given the limited size of the Australasian market, detailed attention to the technology of internationalisation is of critical importance to the future of software development in the region, as is the availability of graduates adequately prepared for this environment. Thus motivated, this paper examines the state of play in a number of aspects of application level software internationalisation, with our focus the core technical challenges of the next few years, and the need to transfer such skills to graduates and practitioners alike.

9:30: Keynote Address: Language Technology and Software Internationalisation

Robert Dale

This talk explores how language technology might be used to support software internationalisation. We begin by defining what language technology -- the use of computational techniques to process and manipulate human language -- is in the large, and describing briefly the various processing steps involved in most language technology applications. We then go on to examine three areas of language technology that might provide some utility in software internationalisation:

• Machine translation, which takes a source text in one language and produces a text in another specified target language: there are existing machine translation solutions for many language pairs in the world, but the quality of the results is extremely variable.
• Controlled language processing, which defines a restricted and well-defined subset of a natural language like English: documents written in a controlled language can be more easily manipulated by natural language processing tools, making it easier, for example, to produce high quality translations.
• Knowledge authoring tools, where the idea is to start with a representation of content that is independent of any particular natural language, and then to use natural language generation techniques to automatically render this content in the chosen natural languages.

In each case, we will attempt to provide a realistic appraisal of the potential for the technologies involved.

Some New Problem Domains: 11:00AM - 12:30PM

11:00: Internationalisation in the Web Services Domain

Kim Elms

The development of internationalisation-aware programming language support -- following on from the widespread adoption of the Unicode standard - has meant that many of the localisation problems which have plagued developers have now been mitigated for the stand-alone application. As one generation of challenges is addressed, however, developments in technology and demand for services ensures that another will emerge. Among the more pressing issues for internationalisation research is the challenge of the web services domain, with the additional burden of real time adaptation and integration of resources from disparate locales.

SAP is the world's largest vendor of enterprise systems, with a developing presence in the web services domain. Moreover, for SAP software internationalisation has always been a priority, having had its origins in the multilingual European environment. Thus market pressures to internationalise came early. This presentation explores the additional problems faced by the developer of internationalised web services, the need for integration with exisiting systems and and the role of emerging standards and XML based technologies in solving them.

11:45: Towards a multi-lingual workflow system - a practical outlook

Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu and Maryam Purvis

Due to rapid development in the global market, workflow systems are not limited to a single country. Electronic business, like workflows span across countries and hence there arises the need for understanding among the users of the system to operate/use them in their own local language. For software such as workflow management systems it is highly imperative that it should be internationalized as some of the processes/sub-processes of the workflow might be in a different country and the people in that locality would express a strong need for localizing the software. In this paper we explain some aspects of internationalization such as user interfaces, feedback information and the text messages in various graphs depicting the progress of the workflow processes. We also describe the problems that we encountered and the challenges that still lie to be explored.

Practice and Curriculum 2:30PM - 4:00PM

2:30: Internationalisation in the Large at Oracle

John Richardson

This presentation is focused upon the most significant problems of software internationalisation which we have confronted at Oracle over the past decade, as the core database and application suites have been deployed in as many as twenty-eight different languages, with numerous additional locale variations. While some of this material is necessarily historical, it provides a critical industry backdrop to the substantial technical progress which has been made in recent years, and some opportunity to reflect on some of the more useful and enduring of the approaches adopted.

Nevertheless, in spite of our success in addressing these initial issues, the increasing complexity of modern applications and the more demanding business environment have introduced additional challenges, and the remainder of the talk is devoted to two of the more important:

• Simultaneous shipping of applications to multiple target locales -- with reference to the Oracle SimShip project
• The difficulty of internationalising applications to take account of locale-specific business rules

The presentation will conclude with some attempt at a wish-list for tool support in these and other areas of the problem domain.

3:15: Developing and Delivering a Software Internationalisation Subject

Tony Sahama, Chris Ho-Stuart and James M. Hogan

This paper describes the content and delivery of a software internationalisation subject (ITN677) that was developed for Master of Information Technology (MIT) students in the Faculty of Information Technology at Queensland University of Technology. This elective subject introduces students to the strategies, technologies, techniques and current development associated with this growing 'software development for the world' specialty area. Students learn what is involved in planning and managing a software internationalisation project as well as designing, building and using a software internationalisation application. Students also learn about how a software internationalisation project must fit into an over-all product localisation and globalisation that may include culturalisation, tailored system architectures, and reliance upon industry standards. In addition, students are exposed to the different software development techniques used by organizations in this arena and the perils and pitfalls of managing software internationalisation projects.

4:00: Close