Bowne & Co., Inc. (NYSE: BNE – News) announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell Bowne Global Solutions to Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: LIOX – News), a provider of globalization and testing services, for a total sale price with a value of at least $180 million.

Under the terms of the agreement, the consideration consists of at least $130 million in cash and 9.4 million shares of Lionbridge common stock. If the shares issued to Bowne do not have a value of $50 million at the time of closing, Lionbridge will issue a subordinated note to Bowne of up to $20 million to bring the value of the shares, together with the note, to $50 million. If the shares have a value greater than $68 million, the number of shares will be reduced so that the value is no greater than $68 million. Bowne will also receive one seat on the Lionbridge Board of Directors.

The Bowne Board of Directors is reviewing plans for the proceeds from the sale. Alternatives under review include further investment in the core businesses (including strategic acquisitions), debt retirement, share repurchases and/or cash dividends. Bowne currently has authorization for the buyback of up to $35 million of the company’s common stock.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions. Goldman, Sachs & Co. served as the financial advisor to Bowne.

The Company stated that its full-year guidance, regarding BGS’ revenue of $225 to $265 million and segment profit of $19 to $24 million, is unchanged from the outlook provided April 28, 2005.

Bowne has scheduled a conference call to discuss this transaction with investors on Tuesday, June 28 at 10:00 a.m. (Eastern Time). To join the webcast, log on to http://www.bowne.com. To access the call via telephone, please dial:

Domestic callers: (877) 502-9272

International callers: (913) 981-5581

A replay of the call will be available at http://www.bowne.com from 1 p.m., June 28, through midnight, July 12, 2005. To access the rebroadcast via telephone, please dial: (888) 203-1112 (domestic) or (719) 457-0820 (international); use passcode 3605414.

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Ever wondered what are the biggest companies in the translation and localization industry? Common Sense Advisory has the answer.

This report is available now
This report, available for free for anybody in the industry, also establishes the size of the worlwide translation and localization market, and growth projections for the next five years.
Some of the players are not the usual suspects. Check it out… your company might be there.

Click here to read the Quick Take

Read more in our blog
If you want to read some more about this deal, read also our Global Watchtower, where we comment on news related to the industry.
By the way, did you know that you can get our blog automatically in your news? If you use MyYahoo, for example, just select “Add New Content” and add the following URL: http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/en/news/global_watchtower_rss.xml

Go to the Global Watchtower

And while you are at it…
Two years ago we polled people who make their living in translation, localization, and internationalization on how they feel about industry conferences. It’s time to check again. The survey should take you about 10 minutes to complete. Everyone who completes the survey will receive a copy of the 2003 report plus the list of top-finishing BEST and WORST conferences from this report. Take the survey now.

Common Sense Advisory, Inc., an independent research and consulting firm, announces the launch of the Global Watchtowerâ„¢, a blog-like forum for sharing its commentary and assessment of globalization- or global business-related press releases and announcements.

The Global Watchtower™ contains entries from Don DePalma, author of the premier book on business globalization, “Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing,” and Renato Beninatto, longtime language industry expert who is known as the go-to resource for translation and localization.

Visit Common Sense Advisory’s Global Watchtowerâ„¢ for commentary on the latest business globalization news or to submit a news item for consideration. Analysts review events, press releases, or issues – and assess their importance using the patented three-habañero scale. Visitors can add the Global Watchtowerâ„¢ to their RSS readers or feeds.

Source: Common Sense Advisory press release

My proposed presentation for the ATA 46th Annual Conference in Seattle, Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online, was accepted, and is scheduled for Saturday, November 12, 2005 3:30-5:00 p.m.

This is a repeat of the well-received presentation I gave at the 2005 ATA TCD Annual Conference in Philadelphia on Saturday, April 16, 2005 and the subject of a series of articles by the same title, the first of which was published in Volume 5, Issue 2 of the ATA TCD News.

My copy of The Culturally Customized Web Site by Nitish Singh and Arun Pereira arrived yesterday from the publisher (Elsevier). The price offered by the publisher when following the link from Nitish Singh’s homepage ($23.96) was lower than the price on Amazon.com which was list ($29.95) and the publisher shipped it gratis. It comes endorsed by John Yunker, author of Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies, who says it’s “a valuable tool for helping executives successfully localize their web site”.

By the way, I found out about this book thanks to Amazon.com’s personalized recommendations. Aside from buying books from Amazon.com, I’ve taken the time to click “I own it” under “RATE THIS ITEM” on the Amazon.com page describing each book I’ve purchased elsewhere. Doing this really put the “personalized” in my personalized recommendations.

Also, Don DePalma’s book, Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing is now available in paperback on Amazon.com for only $16.96 (list price for the paperback is $19.95, list for the now-out-of-print hardcover edition was $29.95).

Reaffirming its heralded position as guardian of global culture (cheese, wine, literature, extended vacations, and things that smell), the French and other EU nations have mustered up enough dander to protect the world against latest “risk of crushing American domination…” Google.

Late last year, the sinister forces of Google reached an agreement with five major libraries to digitize 15 million books and make them accessible online.

Sacre Bleu!

You can see how this might be a problem.

In response, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, head of the French National Library, called on President Jacques Chirac to “make the collections of the great libraries in France and Europe more widely and more rapidly accessible on the Internet.”

The creation of a European search engine would defend French and other languages by being published in their original tongues.

This last point has puzzled some as Google is published in over a 100 languages.

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Is the world of the 21st century flat, as Thomas L. Friedman argues in his new book that identifies globalization as the most important trend of our times?

His analysis and the challenges it raises will kick off an expansive public radio project, Think Globally, with an event to be broadcast in Minnesota at 7 tonight from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul. The event, which is sold out, is scheduled for rebroadcast next month (May 16-22) as National Public Radio concentrates on the meaning of globalization in our lives.

OK, so your instinct is to wiggle around in your chair and station-surf for sports because thinking globally is too big for your brain. Resist your instinct.

The global really is local. It’s about how you, your kids, your work, your education fit into the fast-spinning web of interconnections accelerated in the last few years by technology. Expect documentaries, commentary, listener-participation, cultural segments and investigative reports. For a preview of coming attractions and for Web-only material, check out the radio collaboration’s site at thinkglobal2005.org.

What the public radio people have put together for tonight is a forum for us to consider how to meet the future quickly and smartly.

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My last post, “Nguyen Never Forgets the Long Journey to America“, reminded me of a line from the end of the poem, “The New Colossus,” by nineteenth-century American poet Emma Lazarus. This poem appears on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty, and describes her. In this line, the statue herself is speaking:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Reading it, I was overcome by emotion and tears washed over my eyes. My ancestors, too, reached these shores, landing at Ellis Island. I, too, am free.

Packed in an overcrowded boat, her skin blistering under the searing heat of the mid-day sun, while her stomach betraying her courageous front alerts the other passengers to her desperate need for food and water, 11-year-old Jinny Nguyen clings to her uncle’s arm, locked in fear that their boat – their literal life preserver was sinking, along with their dream for a new life – for freedom on a distant shore.

Although her daring 1979 escape from Vietnam is now little more than a memory, Nguyen, a successful baker and owner of Port Arthur’s Golden Croissant restaurant, said she hopes that Vietnamese children growing up in America today can someday understand the plight that their families endured in order to attain freedom.

Understanding the importance of heritage, Nguyen and her husband Richard have dedicated much of their free time to instructing their children in the customs of their culture.

“I have great kids,” Nguyen said. “They all do great in school. They prefer to speak English of course because that is what they speak in school. But, at home we make them speak Vietnamese. I also bought videos of Vietnamese music for them.”

“They even listen to Vietnamese rap music,” Nguyen said with a hearty laugh. “It doesn’t matter how they learn, just so they learn.”

In addition to language instruction, Nguyen, a richly talented cook, prepares Vietnamese dishes not only in her home, but also in her restaurant.

“I believe you get to know people through their food,” Nguyen said. “We have great food and I love to share it.”

Although brought to America out of tragic events in her homeland, Nguyen said she sees the silver lining in her escape and hopes that today’s Vietnamese children will someday understand the price of freedom.

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The Government of Antigua and Barbuda has moved closer towards implementing its educational policy of making the entire nation multilingual.

During his official visit to the Republic of Cuba, Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer requested assistance from the Cuban government in the provision of tutors in the area of Spanish, the second official language of the Caribbean.

The country’s leader also expressed the government’s interest in short courses in Spanish, including the possibility of teaching that language on radio and television.

The Cuban government expressed their acceptance to collaborate in the teaching of Spanish Language both for primary education and for professors. To this end, a Cuban expert will shortly visit Antigua and Barbuda to carry out preliminary diagnosis and establish a plan of action.

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The Multilateral Investment Fund announced today the approval of a $1,300,000 grant for a technical cooperation program to help small and medium-sized software enterprises in Brazil improve their competitiveness by introducing a quality standard in software development geared towards smaller software businesses, internationalization and localization techniques and business linkages.

The program will be in charge of the Association for the Promotion of Brazilian Software Excellence (Softex) and will seek to make software enterprises more competitive in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. Local counterpart financing provided by Softex will total $1,650,000.

The initiative will benefit 3,000 software companies through the dissemination of project tools. Two hundred and twenty small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) will receive support to improve product quality and 315 specialists will be trained, 40 of them in Argentina and Chile. More than 50 institutions involved in quality enhancement, product internationalization and business partnerships will also benefit, and five export consortia are expected to be generated.

The project will allow to demonstrate and implement, on a significant scale, the merits of the new quality certification system Melhoria de Processo do Software Brasileiro (MPS Br) that was developed by Softex and other institutions. The dissemination of the quality system to two other countries, Argentina and Chile, will set the basis for a region-wide certification system.

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For all those who hate the way their names are being mutilated as a result of the inadequacy of the currently available computer keyboards, a solution to such name mutilation is now in sight.

As from May, 2005, Konyin, the multilingual Computer keyboard would be on sale throughout the country. The keyboard contains not just the naira sign, but also all the alphabets of Nigerian languages.
http://www.oracle.com/go/?&Src=3188850&Act=19

Speaking in Lagos, officials of Lancor Technologies, including the Managing Director, Mr. George Van-Lare and the CTO, Engineer Olukayode Oluwole, who is also the inventor of the keyboard says eight years of intensive research had produced various versions of the product with the present 4th edition being the final. It accommodates all Nigerian languages and not just those of the three big ethnic groups.

The keyboard is capable of typing tonal marks and ascents, diacritical marks and characters, of more than 400 Nigerian languages.

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Franchesca Venneri draws a picture of a little fish on the easel. David Trieu draws a toothy shark underneath. Then teacher Shen Yin, writes the Chinese characters for the two fish next to the drawings.

“Xiao yu,” she says, pointing the fish. “Xiao yu,” her students repeat.

“Sha yu” she says, pointing to David’s shark. “Sha yu” is the response.
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Shen tells them in Mandarin Chinese that sharks eat little fish. To help them remember the words, she has David, 6, chase Franchesca, also 6, around the classroom, to the squeals of their classmates.

So goes the morning at the Mandarin immersion program at Woodstock Elementary School in Southeast, one of only a handful of Chinese-language immersion programs in U.S. public schools. Shen lao shi (teacher Shen), as students call her, is the lead Mandarin teacher. From Beijing, she taught English at the college level before coming to the United States with her husband in 1989.

Like any good kindergarten teacher, Shen uses role-playing, familiar objects and games to teach her students language, math and social studies. She teaches kindergarten in the morning and second grade in the afternoon. Two other Mandarin-speaking teachers split the other four grades.

The kindergartners start from Day One speaking Mandarin. If a child says something in English, Shen repeats it in Mandarin. Shen prefers teaching in grade school to college.

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Mike Hagan, V.P. of Marketing, YMCA of Greater Houston, won an autographed copy of Vacation Spanish at this morning’s AMA Houston Hispanic Marketing SIG event: “The Case for Hispanic Marketing: A Conversation with Alex Lopez Negrete”

The U.S. Hispanic economy’s surging demographics are putting pressure on a healthcare industry already plagued by a shortage of qualified workers, creating increased demand for Hispanic professionals from nurses and doctors to administrative, executive, and emergency personnel.

Already grappling with a rapidly aging U.S. population, as well as mergers and cutbacks, the healthcare industry has strained to keep up with overall nationwide needs, a situation which experts expect to continue. “The demand for qualified healthcare workers will continue to increase as the U.S. population ages,” says Rhonda Lipsey, vertical marketing manager and healthcare employment expert at CareerBuilder.com. “More than 300,000 healthcare jobs were created in 2004 and economists are projecting this trend will continue in 2005 with nurses, medical assistants, and radiology technicians as some of the top-recruited positions.”

But a 2004 report by the Sullivan Commission on Diversity in the Healthcare Workforce highlighted significant disparities in a variety of medical fields. The commission found that while Hispanics account for more than 12 percent of the U.S. population, they represented only 3.3 percent of physicians in 2002 and only 2 percent of registered nurses in 2000.

The commission and other experts say the shortage is translating into lower quality of care and higher rates of illness, disability, and premature death among minorities. The commission and others also note a link to marketplace competitiveness, with poor health outcomes for members of racial and ethnic minorities attributable to a lack of diversity in the health workforce, translating into a loss of productivity, avoidable absenteeism, and increased healthcare costs for businesses employing minorities.

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