Presentations
Language Standards for Global Business©
Barcelona, Spain
May 29-30, 2006

Bettina Reichart, Senior Manager, Vendor & Language Solutions, Oracle Corp (WPTG), Germany

Can Humpty Dumpty Use A BlackBerry?
I plan to cover two main areas.

Language Standards from the perspective of professional/business software users like
• traditional professionals (e.g. accountancy) which rely most heavily on their own standards (e.g. accountancy) and
• IT users/software developers which tend to hook easily on innovations and don't mind using English regardless of their native language

Translating software often forces us to "invent" new words/shift meanings when new concepts and ideas don't have an equivalent in the target language. The newly created terminology then tends to develop into standards by darwinist laws. Are there any reasons to change this?

Language standards (mainly locales) are important for translation and many of them are there already. From a translation point of view they seem to work fine as long as they are used. Is there a need to have a meta-standard or even more of them?

biography