"The rise of a truly multilingual, multicultural on-line community has significant implications for companies competing in the global or regional marketplace. Because an increasingly small percentage of Web customers understand English, companies conducting e-commerce in multiple languages stand to gain significant competitive advantage. The increasing percentage of Web sites that cater to visitors in more than one language indicates that many organizations already appreciate this opportunity. A need to forge e-business alliances that span national boundaries has further increased the need for multilingual applications.
"e-business, in short, is global. Yet developing and maintaining global Web applications has not been an easy task. The business rationale for addressing the linguistic and cultural preferences of Web customers and business partners is compelling; however, the resources required to achieve and maintain that level of service may exceed its perceived value.
"To realistically and efficiently reach this goal ahead of the competition, we need new tools and software services to ensure that the site can provide international support. Domino Global WorkBench 6 is one of these tools, already widely used by Domino developers around the world."
-- Thierry Mayeur
Senior Product Marketing Manager
IBM Globalization Team
Note: This article is based on an article by Mr. Mayeur, Multilingual Web Sites with Domino Global WorkBench in R5, published in 'The View', July/August 1999.
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