The impact of emerging markets on global economics is twofold: The massive buying power of the populations of China, India, Indonesia and elsewhere is being unlocked through localization. More importantly, the emergence of these economies seems set to continue and new countries are opening up. The repeated boom and bust cycles of the past in Africa and Latin America have been replaced by sustained growth in Asia and Eastern Europe. At first glance, these two markets couldn’t be more different. The political systems and dominant religions are extremely diverse, and populations vary enormously. On closer inspection, certain common characteristics in terms of localization can be set forth.
For example, non-Latin scripts dominate. Lack of technical language support, line-break issues, segmentation difficulties, expansion and font size problems, and incompatibilities are very common. Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) Tool support is missing or incomplete. Even for more established languages such as Thai, there is no support for using Thai as a source. Even as we move to the Indic languages and the soon-to-emerge languages such as Burmese and Khmer, there is poor support for them by CAT tools. Unicode exists, but is not necessarily adopted....
Above excerpt taken from the April/May 2014 issue of MultiLingual published by MultiLingual Computing, Inc. To read the full version, you can subscribe to MultiLingual magazine here: http://www.multilingual.com/digital