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The countries of the former Soviet Bloc are
becoming more and more attractive destinations for
U.S. and Western European companies looking to expand
their international sales. These markets are growing
in overall economic power and importance, and thus
represent strategic markets for long-term growth
for companies that can build brand loyalty early
on.
Although they are part of Europe, these countries
present their own unique challenges that separate
them from the Western European markets that most
international companies consider the “easy”
localization target.
Technical issues
Languages spoken in the former Soviet Bloc are
predominantly written in two different scripts:
Cyrillic and Roman. The division is rooted in the
religious history of the region (Cyrillic is used
in predominantly Orthodox Christian areas and Roman
in Catholic or Protestant areas) and affects the
availability of linguistic resources for these regions.
Furthermore, the Roman-script languages of the region
utilize a number of characters not found in most
Western fonts that make use of ISO 8859-1 encoding,
such as o, ?, l, ?, and so forth. Because of the
differences in character sets, applications localized
for this region must support ISO 8859-2 (Eastern
European Roman), ISO 8859-4 (Lithuanian) and ISO
8859-5 (Cyrillic), and should also support Unicode.
However, even when Unicode support is available,
applications must support these additional code
pages – as well as fonts encoded using them
– since there is a considerable installed
base of legacy fonts and data encoded using these
various standards.
While there is an increasing number of Unicode
fonts and Unicode-capable applications, many fonts
and applications in common use by localizers (including
Quark 4, which is still widely used) do not support
Unicode or all of the languages in the area. At
present the most robust support for Eastern Europe
in a mainstream desktop publishing package is Adobe’s
Creative Suite 2, although the forthcoming release
of Quark 7 should level the playing field somewhat.
As a rule, when localizing documentation for any
Eastern European country, it is best to consult
early on with your localization service provider
to determine any problems that might arise and to
allow the necessary time to find appropriate solutions.
In addition to the need to support a variety of
fonts and encodings, the languages spoken in the
region tend to be grammatically complex. Many traditional
coding practices that would work in English (and
to a lesser extent in other languages), such as
“concatenating” text strings, will not
work and can lead to tremendous problems. This difficulty
is particularly evident in a language such as Hungarian,
which has more than two hundred distinct forms for
each noun. In Russian, the form a number takes depends
on the number, gender and case (grammatical function)
of the noun it precedes, which means that a number
cannot be easily combined with a noun in a computer
program to generate grammatical output. As a result
of the grammatical complexity of languages in this
region, computer code must be carefully internationalized
from the ground up to prevent costly and time-consuming
problems.
Legal issues
Recent expansion of the European Union to much
of Eastern Europe has improved the legal framework
for companies doing business in the region in some
respects, but it has also added a whole new level
of compliance requirements that have come with E.U.
mandates. In addition to facing new regulatory requirements,
these countries may also interpret some E.U. laws
and regulations differently than their Western counterparts.
As a result, it is wise to find good in-country
legal counsel to help meet local requirements that
might otherwise pose a problem for a lawyer trained
in the West.
Though many people recognize that localization
is a legal requirement to do business in most of
Eastern Europe, enforcement of such requirements
varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Comprehensive
knowledge of the English language is lower in this
region than in many other countries. For example,
a lack of localization that might be tolerated in
Germany or Sweden will not work in Poland or Estonia.
Hence, even if a legal requirement for localization
would not be enforced, it makes good business sense
to fully localize products.
Cultural and business issues
There are few generalizations that can be made
about Eastern Europe because of its large geographic
size and its wide collection of differing histories
and customs. Nevertheless, certain common characteristics
can affect businesses. One of the most important
is Internet penetration. While Internet access is
in fact growing, it is still not as extensive as
in the United States or Western Europe and, therefore,
customers cannot yet be expected to have ready or
inexpensive online access. Additionally, many will
not have credit cards either so locally acceptable
alternatives must be sought (in much of the region,
postal money orders are a common way to send payments).
Any Web site sales or localization efforts must
account for these factors.
Software and media piracy are also significant
issues in the region. A visit to almost any open
market in a large Eastern European city will reveal
copies of major software packages being sold for
as little as a few Euro. Although piracy is illegal,
enforcement of anti-piracy laws is spotty and ineffective.
Piracy, coupled with the decreased buying power
in Eastern European countries, may force companies
to think about changing their pricing for these
markets: a reasonable price in Boston will be exorbitant
in Kraków (Cracow), Poland. If pricing is
different in these markets, companies also need
to consider how these price differences across borders
may affect sales in neighboring markets and how
such “gray market” sales may impact
overall sales and development strategy.
Despite the technical and business-related issues
that can complicate localization for Eastern Europe,
these obstacles can be overcome with proper planning
and a little bit of care. Working closely with your
localization provider(s) and your local partners
will help you identify and resolve issues before
they become a problem. With careful attention and
foresight, businesses can gain a foothold in a region
that is set to play a larger and larger role in
the European and global economies.
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