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Localisation in Australia

James M. Hogan explains how the emergence of a culturally rich Australia, together with input from the open source community, has led to a vibrant localisation industry there

Originally published in September 2005 issue of Localisation Focus. To learn more about Localisation Focus, click here.

WELCOME TO BRISBANE, THE NATURAL CENTRE FOR SOFTWARE LOCALISATION. Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi and Tamil? How about Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and a range of European languages and their South American variants? Such an opening to a Country Focus article would have been unimaginable even a decade ago; yet it reflects a burgeoning movement in Australian localisation, and one which is attracting growing attention from local and provincial governments seeking to enhance the growth of knowledge- and technologybased industries.

Traditional translation services have a long and successful history in Australia, driven largely by government, the post-war boom in exports to Japan, and the emergence of a vibrant tourism sector. Modern Australia began as a British colony, and while (through good fortune) many aboriginal languages have survived, English, and all-things-English, dominated Australian life from the early 1800s.

This inward, Anglo-centric focus survived several waves of European and Asian migration, losing its grip only gradually in the last decades of the twentieth century. Yet each influx brought with it an enhancement of the linguistic and cultural diversity of the country, laying the foundations for an explicit multiculturalism and internationalised economy which have characterised Australian life since the 1980s.

A growing cultural richness, coupled with excellence in language education, has seen the development over the past 20 years of several successful localisation and content management providers. These firms have attracted an impressive list of clients from the region, and indeed from as far afield as Scandinavia — like their counterparts in New Zealand, Australian localisation houses have profited enormously from modern connectivity. Most companies maintain formal or informal relationships with international partners — for example the Commercial Translation Centre (CTC) is a member of the PRTi group, and the International Language Company was acquired some years ago by the New Zealand firm Pacific International Translations.

In some respects, therefore, localisation in Australia mirrors developments in other mid-size economies, with the more successful enterprises offering specialist domain services, well-established, high quality coverage in niche language areas and a recent broadening to full content management solutions. Yet it is in the less traditional area of software localisation — and particularly in the dynamic environment of the open source movement — that the most exciting developments are emerging.

For Brisbane, the Queensland capital and our point of departure, is the home of the Asia Pacific headquarters of Red Hat, and the key centre for localisation of the Linux desktop environment. The open source translation model is a remarkably successful mix of strategic vendor investment and community involvement, with localisation proceeding rapidly from the economically viable core (for which localisation provides immediate commercial returns to the vendor) to languages and locales outside the commercial mainstream — for which the community model provides the only chance of timely localisation. Quality assurance in these projects is surprisingly good, reflecting the best of the open source bazaar, with volunteer and professional translators alike contributing to the pool, and establishing credibility through ongoing exposure to community review and the sustained quality of their contributions.

Over time, this combination has resulted in the successful migration of the KDE desktop to more than 80 language-locale pairs.

One of the more intriguing issues in localisation lies in whether this model may be adopted by proprietary vendors to extend their coverage into developing economies. Similarly intriguing — at least to the uninitiated — is the question of why anyone would run a cutting edge localisation facility in Australia in the first place.

The answer lies in the mix that is modern Australia: a highly educated community which includes many technically literate native speakers of European and Asian languages, a cost structure which provides advantages over Europe and the United States without sacrificing political stability, and an established and robust university system which delivers the range of skills required. While localisation is inevitably becoming a globally-distributed activity, vendors have been able to build a team of experienced technical translators and software localisation specialists from ‘local’ talent, and to supplement this core by virtual participation — both professionals and volunteers — from throughout the world.

A revolution in the making? Not yet, perhaps. But a proven template for cost-effective localisation and broadening of coverage. And from the most surprising of sources.

James M. Hogan is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at the Queensland University of Technology, where he leads research and teaching in Software Internationalisation. His interests include the role of XML standards in open source localisation. He may be contacted at j.hoganNOSPAM@qut.edu.au (remove NOSPAM to email).