Greetings, all. On the call this past Tuesday, several people asked
about the multi language support capabilities within the IBM Global
Services artifact repositories. I posed this question to the
KnowledgeView owner and wanted to share his reply with the group.
Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Best regards,
Mark May


In KnowledgeView specific projects have been run to provide support
for the nine non-English languages that are most important to the
business - Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Korean, Chinese
Mandarin, Japanese, Italian, Dutch.

The focus is on providing content management resource in those
languages and having resource to encourage knowledge harvesting,
encourage the creation of a leadership message and identify key links
for that language (these may be targetted at the countries that use
the language rather than the language itself).

Certain types of entries are required to always have an english
language abstract (because they can be a pointer to people and work
products), but the remainder of the document can be in local
language. For other types of documents an english language abstract
should be provided if the document is of regional or global
relevance. If it is deemed to be only relevant to a particular
country, then the entire document can be in local language.

The taxonomy is global and in English language - we don't provide non-
English equivalent terms.

Search is available in all the languages supported (including the
double-byte languages Japanese, Korean, Chinese).

Navigation is English language only.

We have not availed ourselves of using the IBM or business partner
products that do realtime language translation. For basic
translation, users can leverage free sites on www like altavista,
yahoo, etc. Machine translation still doesn't do that well on
technical terms, so for an important document human involvement may
be needed. There is an organization available within IBM to provide
this service.