Presenter:

Richard Ishida

Internationalization Activity Lead,
W3C

Steven R. Loomis
Software Engineer, IBM

ICU is a very popular internationalization software solution. However, while it vastly simplifies the internationalization of products, there is a learning curve.

The goal of this tutorial is to help new users of ICU install and use the library. Topics include: Installation (C++ libraries, Java .jar files, Java SPI for JDK integration), verification of installation, introduction and detailed usage analysis of ICU's frameworks (normalization, formatting, calendars, collation, transliteration). The tutorial will walk through code snippets and examples to illustrate the common usage models, followed by demonstration applications and discussion of core features and conventions, advanced techniques and how to obtain further information. It is helpful if participants are familiar with Java, C and C++ programming. Issues relating to ICU4C/C++ as well as ICU4J (Java) will be discussed. After the tutorial, participants should be able to install and use ICU for solving their internationalization problems.

This updated presentation will include newer ICU features such as AlphabeticIndex and the DateTimePatternGenerator.

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect,
Lab126 (Amazon)

This tutorial track provides an introduction to the topics of internationalization, localization and globalization. Attendees will understand the overall concepts and approach necessary to analyze a product for internationalization issues, develop a design or approach, and deliver a global-ready solution. The focus is on architectural approaches and general concepts, but will include specific examples and exercises.

Presenter:

Richard Ishida

Internationalization Activity Lead,
W3C

The tutorial will provide you with a good understanding of the many unique characteristics of non-Latin writing systems, and illustrate the problems involved in implementing such scripts in products. It does not provide detailed coding advice, but does provide the essential background information you need to understand the fundamental issues related to Unicode deployment, across a wide range of scripts. It has also proved to be an excellent orientation for newcomers to the conference, providing the background needed to assist understanding of the other talks! The tutorial goes beyond encoding issues to discuss characteristics related to input of ideographs, combining characters, context-dependent shape variation, text direction, vowel signs, ligatures, punctuation, wrapping and editing, font issues, sorting and indexing, keyboards, and more. The concepts are introduced through the use of examples from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Hindi/Tamil, Russian and Greek. While the tutorial is perfectly accessible to beginners, it has also attracted very good reviews from people at an intermediate and advanced level, due to the breadth of scripts discussed. No prior knowledge is needed.

Jim DeLaHunt
Principal, Jim DeLaHunt & Associates

Tex Texin

Globalization Architect, Xencraft

Presenters:

Craig R. Cummings Globalization Lead, Zynga, Inc.

Michael McKenna
International Engineering Leader, Zynga, Inc.

Aharon Lanin
Software Engineer, Google

Richard Ishida
Internationalization Activity Lead,
W3C

Andrew Glass
Program Manger, Microsoft

This tutorial explains the problems encountered when authoring web pages in a right-to-left language, or even left-to-right pages containing snippets of right-to-left text, and offers a step-by-step guide for preventing most of them. It will also highlight the relevant new features in HTML5, CSS3, and Unicode 6.3."

Daniel Goldschmidt
Sr. International Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation

Iris Orriss
Head of Localization, Facebook

Track 3 - Localization Workshop

Two highly experienced industry experts will illuminate the basics of localization for session participants over the course of three one-hour blocks. This instruction is particularly oriented to participants who are new to localization. Participants will gain a broad overview of the localization task set, issues and tools. Subjects covered will be fundamental problems that localization addresses such as components of localization projects, localization tools and localization project management. There will also be time for questions and answers plus the opportunity to take individual questions offline with the presenters.

Presenter:

Martin J. Dürst

Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University

This part of the tutorial covers character normalization in Unicode. It starts with a short history of normalization to help participants understand the purpose of normalization. We will then introduce the four standard normalization forms (NFC, NFCK, NFD, NFDK), followed by (non-official!) normalization variants and other normalization operations such as quick checks. Next, we cover normalization pitfalls such as the interaction of normalization with other operations (e.g. string concatenation, casing) and Unicode versions and corrigenda. We continue by discussing implementation-related details including where to find the necessary data for implementation and testing, and various trade-offs for efficient implementations. We conclude giving guidelines and advice on where to use which form of normalization (and where to not use normalization).

Norbert Lindenberg
Internationalization Consultant, Lindenberg Software LLC

Topics include resource loading, message construction, sorting, number formatting and date and time formatting, support for emoji and other supplementary characters, regular expressions, Unicode normalization, and internationalized domain names.

Daniel Goldschmidt
Sr. International Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation

Iris Orriss
Head of Localization, Facebook

Presenter: 

Presenter:

Roy Yokoyama

Principal Global Engineer, Google-Motorola Mobility

Android is the world's most popular mobile platform. There are more than 600,000 apps and games available worldwide and growing strong. This panel will cover the anatomy of Android localization frameworks, structure of resource assets and qualifiers, and how to localize your applications.

Presenter:

Peter Edberg

Senior Software Engineer, Apple Inc.

Mark Davis
Sr. Internationalization Architect, Google Inc.

Steven R. Loomis
Software Engineer, IBM

The Unicode Consortium's Common Locale Data Repository project (CLDR) defines LDML (Locale Data Markup Language) and uses it to organize and provide the most extensive open repository of locale data, with data collected primarily via the web-based Survey Tool. This session provides a brief overview of CLDR, then focuses on recent and forthcoming enhancements, including more consistent non-Gregorian calendar support and addition of the Korean Dangi lunar calendar, formatting time durations, collation data changes, more control of currency formatting, improvements to the data collection process, and JSON support. A significant amount of time will be reserved for demos of behavior based on CLDR data.

Presenters:

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect,
Lab126 (Amazon)

Richard Ishida
Internationalization Activity Lead, W3C

New standards activity at the W3C and other standards bodies is helping improve the globalization of the Web. From HTML5 to CSS3, from JavaScript to Unicode bidi, support for creating international content and Web-based applications is evolving quickly. This presentation, from W3C internationalization leaders Addison Phillips and Richard Ishida explores the changes that are available today, the status of on-going work, and the challenges that remain. 

Michael S. Kaplan
Program Manager, Microsoft

Presenters:

Peter Edberg

Senior Software Engineer, Apple Inc.

Mark Davis
Sr. Internationalization Architect, Google Inc.

Steven R. Loomis
Software Engineer, IBM

Coming Soon...

Presenter:

Felix Sasaki
DFKI / W3C Fellow

The Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 http://www.w3.org/TR/its20/ is an upcoming technology developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Its predecessor, ITS 1.0, provides a set of metadata items ("data categories") for creating internationalized XML which can be localized effectively. ITS 2.0 extends the scope of ITS 1.0 in various ways. First, ITS 2.0 can be applied to further formats, e.g. HTML5 or other versions of HTML. Second, ITS 2.0 provides additional data categories (one aim is to create further application areas for ITS in the realm of automated language processing such as machine translation, text analysis annotation or workflows including automatic language quality checks). Third, ITS 2.0 provides implementations in interoperability usage scenarios. A dedicated draft document http://www.w3.org/TR/mlw-metadata-us-impl/ already has been published to provide information about these scenarios. This presentation will 1) introduce the basic principles of ITS 2.0; 2) describe its relation to technologies like HTML5 and XLIFF; 3) exemplify selected data categories and usage scenarios; and 4) discuss what ITS 2.0 cannot achieve and what might be desirable in the future.

Presenter:

Jeremy Cole

Sr. System Engineer, Google, Inc.

MySQL is one of the world's most popular relational database systems, powered many of the world's busiest websites. As the world has moved toward Unicode,MySQL has had to do so as well. Learn about the challenges specific to MySQL, general database challenges, solutions, and pitfalls for internationalization of databases and internationalization and localization of MySQL itself. MySQL has not always made the best decisions in its support of Unicode, so we'll also look at some of the snags MySQL has encountered along the way. 

Presenter:

John Emmons

Senior Software Engineer, IBM

The Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) is the most extensive and widely used standard repository of locale data for software developers to use as a resource in building internationalized applications. The data is typically published in XML format as defined by the Locale Data Markup Language ( LDML ) specification ( Unicode Technical Report TR#35 ). XML format, however, is not always the best choice when it comes to writing applications for the web. This presentation will highlight recent efforts by the CLDR technical committee to create and maintain an algorithm and tool set to convert CLDR's data to a standardized JSON format that would be consumable by Javascript applications, while still being able to represent all the various types of data that are currently maintained in the CLDR.

Presenter:

Nick Patch

Software Engineer, International, Shutterstock

In 2010 the Perl 5 language switched to a yearly major release cycle with monthly developer releases. Perl has a history of great Unicode support and the new development process has enabled the language to rapidly enhance Unicode functionality and support new Unicode standards. This talk will demonstrate the current state of Unicode in Perl, review the exciting changes in the last few years, and touch on future development.

The following core language features will be discussed:

• character strings
• character properties
• regular expressions
• case mapping and case folding
• normalization
• extended grapheme clusters
• segmentation
• identifier names
• UTF-8 source code
• I/O encoding layers

Jungshik Shin

Systems Engineer, Google, Inc.

Presenter:

George Rhoten

Language Technologies Engineer, Apple Inc.

The printed format of this data is typically short hand notation for concepts that are speakable. How would you say a number like the number 1? How do you say the time like 12:00 PM? What is the pronunciation of a date like January 1? What is the pronunciation of a currency value like $1.99? This presentation covers pronunciation topics that are being planned for CLDR.

Presenter:

Martin J. Dürst

Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University

Performance tests with many different implementations and a wide range of languages (German, Vietnamese, Korean,...) with different normalization needs show that our method is one or more orders of magnitude faster than straightforward implementations in scripting languages, and in some cases close to the speed of implementations in compiled languages. Because the code is written in pure Ruby, it is very easily portable and configurable, and similars techniques may be useful for other internationalization operations such as case conversions.

Presenter:

Mark Davis

Sr. Internationalization Architect, Google Inc.

This presentation covers the range of internationalization challenges that Google has encountered and overcome in the past year, illustrating the challenges that many companies face.

Among the topics are how to better serve multilingual users (personal names, plurals, gender, language resolution), localization of entities (http://goo.gl/3s7SR), phone numbers and addresses, expanding CLDR and ICU (and Google products) to more languages, speech-to-text, machine translation, input & fonts, client-side i18n, and the overall localization process.

Presenter:

Shan Fu

International QE, Adobe Systems

Localization testing of multilingual software is important for a company's international marketing strategy. Nowadays, language-oriented working model is widely used in software localization functional testing; however, this model doesn't work as expected in testing efficiency and effectiveness in practice. This proposal introduces a new working model for localization functional testing to improve the product quality and reduce the testing cost by taking one Adobe product localization functional testing as an example; what's more, it also discusses how to choose a proper working model for large-scale localization functional testing.

Unlike the original "language-oriented" model, this new working model is based on feature-oriented model, and has been improved according to team size, languages, product type, testing phase and other factors. This enhanced working model has proved to be effective in localization functional testing on an Adobe enterprise desktop product, which supports over 20 languages.

As an enhanced feature-oriented working model, its main advantages are as follows:

1. Better product quality. With this model, quality engineers could have more opportunities to execute new feature test cases, so they could find more bugs on localization, even on core functions.

2. Higher efficiency, lower cost. In main release of the Adobe product, around 50% of features are new ones, so the cost of time for new features learning is very high. In terms of localization functional testing on new features, the enhanced feature-oriented working model could help reduce working hours by around 30% as opposed to language-oriented one.

3. More helpful for team building. With this model, quality engineers could have a chance to study product features and discuss testing issues in depth, so that both individual capability and team building could be improved.

Practice shows that with this new working model, 15% of cost on localization functional testing has been reduced, and 40% more bugs have been found, which turns out to be more effective than before; besides, it also has a huge business value to a software product targeting international markets.

Presenters:

Tex Texin

Globalization Architect, Xencraft

Craig R. Cummings
Globalization Lead, Zynga, Inc.

Presenter:

TBA

Presenter:

Tex Texin

Globalization Architect, Xencraft

This presentation is an extension of the popular presentation from last year "Does it Hurt When I do This? Data for I18n Testing".

In this session, we recommend specific data values that are likely to identify internationalization problems in software intended for global markets.

Based on years of global software experience, these data values are useful for functional or linguistic QA tests of internationalized software. In the previous session, data value recommendations included character encoding, postal address, locale and other data types typically used in software and will trigger common internationalization problems. This presentation will offer specific new test suggestions.

Norbert Lindenberg
Internationalization Consultant, Lindenberg Software LLC

Nebojša Ćirić
Software Engineer, Google, Inc.

Suresh Jayabalan 

Program Manager, Microsoft

After last year's approval of the first edition of the ECMAScript Internationalization API Specification, internationalization work on the core of JavaScript continued in three areas: Implementation of the API in browsers, broadening its scope in a second edition of the specification, and strengthening Unicode support in the ECMAScript Language Specification. We provide an update on the latest work in all three areas.

Presenter:

Adam Asnes
President, Lingoport

In many organizations, localization engineering teams and i18n engineers must battle to gain developer attention and organizational focus. Often the i18n Lead, if there is one, does not independently command budget initiatives. Yet i18n and localization engineering issues that are found during testing or after the "English" release are tolerated and even considered normal process. When compared to better-funded development initiatives like security, we've heard statements like "nobody gets into the news because of an encoding issue."

The costs in engineering and time are not well understood, and we think if they are clearly accounted for and calculated in a flexible system, we can further the case for software globalization planning and efficiencies at the highest management levels.

Working in association with customers at Intel, the LDS Church and others, we have catalogued the most pervasive types of globalization engineering issues and their effects in an engineering ROI calculator. The calculator accounts for broad scope, variable engineering costs, the time during the development process issues are found and fixed, cost in time and money, and information about delays in planned revenues.

We would like to share this calculator model with the industry to help conference participants and their organizations understand and communicate financial consequences in time, money and strategic objectives.

Presenter:

Travis Keep

Software Engineer, Google, Inc. 

There is a time for everything. Dates and times are an important part of our everyday lives, and displaying them correctly in software is essential. This session will cover some of the subtle details associated with formatting dates and times as well as how the ICU API abstracts away many of these details while still remaining powerful and flexible. Topics include adapting localized formats to a client specification of which fields to include, formatting intervals and durations, handling non-Gregorian calendars, handling special number systems in date formats, and multiple ways of formatting timezone names.

Presenters:

Deborah Anderson

Researcher
University of California Berkeley

Anshuman Pandey
Doctoral Student, Dept. of History, University of Michigan

Since 2002, the UC Berkeley Script Encoding Initiative has been assisting user communities to get various eligible characters and scripts proposed for inclusion in the Unicode Standard. This joint presentation, given by the Project Leader of SEI and one of its key Unicode proposal authors, will discuss the highlights as well as the outstanding problems faced by those proposing unencoded scripts.

The SEI project has been very successful, with over 69 scripts approved by the Unicode Technical Committee. The project has also sponsored work on over 38 preliminary script proposals. (These proposals require additional information and/or user community buy-in before they are considered mature and ready for approval by the standards committees.)

The project's work on final and preliminary proposals has been made possible thanks to funding from NEH, Google, and individual and group donors. However, the NEH and Google support has come to an end, so funding is limited. This presents a problem, for script research and the standards approval process itself take several years. Long-term support is the key to ensuring eligible scripts are kept in the encoding pipeline. The SEI Project Leader will suggest a few ideas on possible approaches to acquiring stable funding.

After 11 years, it would seem the list of unencoded scripts should be significantly reduced, but because of the development of new scripts and increased interest (and recognition of the importance of encoding) of historic scripts, the number of unencoded scripts is at about 90. The co-presenter, Anshuman Pandey, will discuss the creation and propagation of newly constructed scripts, a phenomenon found particularly in South Asia. He will also discuss problems in getting newly approved scripts supported in commercial software and fonts, which hobbles the user communities.

The talk will end with some suggestions on how members of the audience can assist in the effort to get unencoded scripts into Unicode, and be supported in software.

Presenter:

Loïc Dufresne de Virel
Localization Strategist, Intel Corporation

Presenters:

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect, Lab126 (Amazon)

The user interface is often the difference between success and irrelevance for a software product. Getting the maximum of usability, accessibility, and functionality out of design, with a minimum of user befuddlement is a big job.

But what happens when that user interface will be translated into 20 languages? Will the design accommodate their different needs? Will they even fit onto the screen? Are cultural or linguistic issues even addressable at design time? How can the designers, developers, or the localizers see these "flying unicorns" lurking in their design choices without actually building the different language products?

This presentation gives concrete examples from real products showing an approach to reviewing user experience design for a global audience.

Brian Kemler
Program Manager, Google, Inc.

Craig Cornelius
i18n Engineer, Google, Inc.

Google Search is the first major online service to support the Burmese language in its interface. Although the Unicode standard includes a block for the Burmese writing system, Burmese text in websites is written using multiple, non-unicode schemes including Zawgyi and other font encodings. Enthusiastic speakers developed fonts in the vacuum left by major vendors due to fear over trade sanctions or lack of a perceived market importance. Now that Myanmar is opening, interesting challenges arise.

Detecting the encoding methods and processing Burmese text present some intriguing challenges around segmentation, input and output methods. Our discusses these themes, and outlines our progress toward encouraging the standardization of the Burmese language on the web. Of particular importance is promoting the adoption of the Unicode font MM3 within the context of not only Burmese, but also minority languages in Myanmar such as; Karen, Kayah, Pali, Rumai Palaung, and Shan.

Presenter:

Michael McKenna
International Engineering Leader, Zynga, Inc.

• Design issues for global content and global asset database design
• Linguistic issues for social dialog across langauges
• What to track for effective metrics
• Accelerated development life cycles
• Cadence and content release driving blinding speed of process
• Build systems and process automation
• Localization test automation (where possible)
• Portability issues for core technology and build systems across development environments
• Continuous improvement

After this talk, you should have a pretty good idea of what its like to be in the midst of international engineering and production at a fast (really fast) paced social gaming company, publishing dailiy in multiple languages and cultures.

Presenters:

Michael Kuperstein
Localization Engineer, Intel

Octavio Ramos
Localization Software Quality Assurance Lead & Engineer, Intel 

Unfortunately, choosing the wrong language tag can cause technical failures in products, or can cost many thousands of dollars in lost translation memory leveraging, or can create confusion in teams that generates hundreds of emails and awkward workarounds. Perhaps you have installed the Chinese Traditional language pack for Windows, and your application is displaying English instead? Maybe you have localized into French for Canada, and the app refuses to show the translations? Customers may ask, "We want Spanish for Latin America!" Ok then, what is the language tag for Spanish in Latin America - for each of the dozen systems that process language data in your company? What do you do?!?

In this entertaining session, we will place giant red construction cones around the potholes of choosing the wrong language tags when developing drivers, desktop apps, and web applications on various operating systems, or when transferring data between different enterprise and operating systems.

Presenter:

Presenters:

Steven R. Loomis
Software Engineer, IBM

Markus Scherer

Unicode Software Engineer, Google, Inc.

The International Components for Unicode library, or ICU, provides a full range of services for Unicode enablement, and is the globalization foundation used by many software packages and operating systems, from mobile phones like Android or iPhone all the way up to mainframes and cloud server farms. Freely available as open-source, it provides cross-platform C, C++, and Java APIs, with a thread-safe programming model.

This presentation will provide a brief overview of ICU, with emphasis on the recent updates in ICU 51 & 52, including the latest support for Unicode 6.3 and CLDR 24, date/time formatting & parsing improvements, and other changes (see http://site.icu-project.org/download). The presentation will also touch on ICU's planned direction for future releases.

Presenter:

John Huan Vu 

Senior Software Engineer, Zynga Inc.

Presenters:

Markus Scherer

Unicode Software Engineer, Google, Inc.

Mark Davis

Sr. Internationalization Architect, Google Inc.

How do we bring order to 100,000 characters? How do we support 100 language-specific sort orders with little data, and make it fast? How do we build phone book indexes, put your native script first, ignore accents and punctuation, and search for words in a web page?

Join us for a tour of the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA), the CLDR collation data, and the ICU APIs for sorting, indexing and searching.

Presenter:

Roshan Singh

MTS 2, Adobe Systems

Track 1 - NLP: A Quick Global Multilingual Approach to Develop Named Entity Recognizer (NER) Using DBpedia

Named-entity recognition (NER) (also known as entity identification and entity extraction) is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify atomic elements in text into predefined categories such as the names of persons, organizations, locations, expressions of times, quantities, monetary values, percentages, etc. It forms the core of Semantic Text analytics applications. NER systems have been created that use linguistic grammar-based techniques as well as statistical models. Hand-crafted grammar-based systems typically obtain better precision, but at the cost of lower recall and months of work by experienced computational linguists. Statistical NER systems typically require a large amount of manually annotated training data. We discuss DBpedia's multilingual data resource and techniques to extract meaningful information to develop NER which can be extended to all major languages like German, Chinese, Japanese, etc. apart from English. And hence we share a quick global approach to develop a simple NER out of DBpedia with least effort for all major languages (EN, DE, ZH, JA, etc.) which tags more than 10 types of named entities like Person, Place, Organization, Work, Medicine, Transport (vehicle), etc. We demonstrate the NER for EN and DE on various test articles.

Presenter:

Alolita Sharma

Director of Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation

Innovation is key to software engineering success. Wikipedia's innovative language engineering projects use agile development to create high-quality internationalization and localization features and apps in faster iterations. This talk examines what works and what doesn't when using agile development for large open source projects with globally distributed teams. This talk will help developers and engineering managers better implement a successful agile process for their open source projects especially for internationalization and localization engineering.

Presenter:

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect, Lab126 (Amazon)

Sorting is one of the most basic, fundamental things we do with text. When you have lots of data, putting it into some kind of order makes it easier for people to find, access, and use it.

Your Amazon Kindle can store hundreds of books (videos, MP3s, etc.), in many languages used around the globe. How would you sort "Earth's Biggest Selection"? How can you sort many languages of content at the same time?

The Unicode Collation Algorithm is a start. But much more is required. This session gives the basic "tutorial facts" about sorting, and then delves into the additional issues that surround handling user content--and how we turned a real mess (a "dog's breakfast") into something users could navigate.

Manish Aggarwal
Computer Scientist, Adobe Systems

Presenter:

Gaurav Bathla
Quality Engineer Lead Globalization, Adobe Systems

With localization of various Adobe products reaching millions of customers; nearly 26 locales across multiple Windows and Mac platforms get modified for any change in the English version of the product; increasing the complexity as the change needs to be tested across a matrix of around 300 variants. The situation moves towards a nail biting end; around the release time frame of the product. With the agile-scrum model these changes come regularly and with a shorter turnaround time; thus generating a need for a better managed model for localization.

Reviewing the challenges faced and the adhoc solutions employed over the past cycles for various Adobe products; a strategic change to the approach of the agile development process was tested. As part of the change every module of the product was treated as a sovereign artifact complete with exclusive development, testing, UI freeze and release cycles before integrating the same into the product mainline independent of the scrum timelines. These modules were strictly frozen from development perspective once integrated. This methodology along with multiple other process enhancements reduced the re-work timeframe to a miniscule level as compared to earlier cycle in addition to a huge saving in localization efforts.

Presenter:

Andrew Glass
Program Manger, Microsoft

This presentation will look at a few complex writing systems that have recently been enabled for input and display on Windows.

Presenter:

Roshan Singh

MTS 2, Adobe Systems 

Ontology provides controlled, consistent vocabularies to describe concepts and relationships. It forms the core of Semantic Text analytics applications. Currently building ontology is complex, manual and time consuming. We discuss Wikipedia's multilingual data resource structured in the form of complex directed graph and issues in parsing the graph to extract meaningful information and ontology tree which can be extended to all major languages like German, Chinese, Japanese, etc. apart from English. We have developed ontology in EN, DE, ZH and JA and the solution can be extended to all other major languages supported by wikipedia.

We demonstrate "Manthan" (the document categorizer), an application of this dynamic Ontology, to classify/categorize arbitrary documents in EN and DE. The result section also visually displays the tree hierarchy of the category path extracted out of ontology.

Presenter:

Saurav Gupta

Sr. Globalization Lead, Adobe Systems

This paper will take you through the journey of one of the flagship products (Illustrator) starting from transition from typical waterfall model to Agile, adapting to Agile with adoptions of new strategies, defining the new Localization best practices, writing down the success story of making to market.

Also with this paper, putting few thoughts on table around handling of Localization errands in an effective and timely manner with our new improvised strategies. The new strategies, tools and techniques presented here might add a new dimension to your thinking process and to your operational style in Agile. The strategies would talk about forestalling the Localization issues (selective approach), early detecting the truncation and Layout issues, pushing Linguistic testing earlier in the cycle, optimizing the testing efforts by smarter distribution and redefining build transfer strategies to share with testing partners in shorter duration.

This paper broadly covers:

• Market and Agile
• Localization in Agile World
• Adobe Products - Successful story
• Comparison of Waterfall vs. Agile (Factual Data collected during the execution of project)
• Challenges encountered
• Process refinements
• New strategies, tools and techniques
• Localization Best Practices (in Agile World)

Presenter:

Behnam Esfahbod

Research Assistant, Xencraft

Arabic script has faced radical changes in the past century that have left it in a critical situation in the digital era. Writing styles for the script look fairly different from region to region, yet it always is considered the same script in the mind of its natives. Logical encoding of the script and existence of similar characters in Unicode Arabic blocks have caused serious challenges for most of multilingual applications.

Providing a model for the textual part of human-computer interaction, we model security and usability issues of Latin and Arabic scripts, demonstrate the similarity of the problems in these two scripts, and introduce the Arabic Script Shape Mapping algorithm as a unified method for applications - like internationalized domain names and user identifiers - to handle such problems. The algorithm is designed for simplicity and behaves similar to how Unicode Case Mapping algorithm works for Latin script and the like.

Shifting the solution from the servers to applications, we show that how this algorithm can be used to maintain enhance usability for average users, whilst eliminate the need for complicated methods like "bundling" used in internationalized domain names.

Program is subject to change.