Michael McKenna

Michael McKenna

San Francisco Bay Area
2K followers 500+ connections

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Global Business and Technology Expert with strong track record for reducing cost and time…

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    Square

    Oakland, California, United States

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Licenses & Certifications

Volunteer Experience

  • Unicode Consortium Graphic

    CLDR Person Group Chair

    Unicode Consortium

    - Present 4 years 6 months

    Science and Technology

    Sub-committee Chair for CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) Person Group. The Person Group is working on global standards for locale-specific presentation of personal identity information.

    The current project is focused on personal names and their representation depending on the context - what length? what is the formality? how is it sorted? are you talking about a person, or to a person? how do you represent a text avatar of the name? how do you represent mononyms, patronymics, or…

    Sub-committee Chair for CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) Person Group. The Person Group is working on global standards for locale-specific presentation of personal identity information.

    The current project is focused on personal names and their representation depending on the context - what length? what is the formality? how is it sorted? are you talking about a person, or to a person? how do you represent a text avatar of the name? how do you represent mononyms, patronymics, or multiple surnames? how do you handle names in a different script or from a different locale?

  • Unicode Consortium Graphic

    Speaker, Contributor

    Unicode Consortium

    - Present 29 years 8 months

    Science and Technology

    Speaker, session chair, and contributor for Internationalization and Unicode Conferences on three continents.

  • Speaker, Member of Advisory Board

    Worldware Conference

    - 3 Jahre

    Science and Technology

    One of the founding members of the advisory board to help bring the Worldware Conference series to fruition.

    This conference is aimed at the technical manager, product manager, and project manager of the software globalization process. The aim is to foster the industry to better understand how to manage, track, and evangelize the ROI of software internationalization and localization.

  • Perspectives USA Graphic

    Coordinator

    Perspectives USA

    - 22 years

    Bildung

    Perspectives on the World Christian Movement

    Coordinated a series of lectures by professional experts in biblical studies, history, strategy, anthropology, sociology, and organization of NGO's. Required handling finances and tuition for classes of up to 50 students along with marketing, outreach, and making travel arrangements for up to 14 different speakers, each coming on a weekly basis. Students received university-level credit from institutions such as Golden Gate University or…

    Perspectives on the World Christian Movement

    Coordinated a series of lectures by professional experts in biblical studies, history, strategy, anthropology, sociology, and organization of NGO's. Required handling finances and tuition for classes of up to 50 students along with marketing, outreach, and making travel arrangements for up to 14 different speakers, each coming on a weekly basis. Students received university-level credit from institutions such as Golden Gate University or Fuller Theological Seminary.

Publications

  • Pseudo-localizaiton in Action

    38th Unicode Conference

    Pseudo localization is an effective way to detect i18n/l10n issues, the effective use of pseudo localization can mean huge savings for a company. A well designed flexible pseudo localization tool is critical. At PayPal, we use pseudo localization to help us process multiple content types (XML-based content, Java properties, mobile resource files, etc.) with various pseudo localization patterns on multiple platforms. In addition to supporting classic pseudo localization practices such as dynamic…

    Pseudo localization is an effective way to detect i18n/l10n issues, the effective use of pseudo localization can mean huge savings for a company. A well designed flexible pseudo localization tool is critical. At PayPal, we use pseudo localization to help us process multiple content types (XML-based content, Java properties, mobile resource files, etc.) with various pseudo localization patterns on multiple platforms. In addition to supporting classic pseudo localization practices such as dynamic text expansion and readability of resulting text, it also supports pseudo patterns that are custom made for Asian languages as well as RTL languages. With this tool, it is easy to add support for future content types and more pseudo localization patterns, as well as integrating Machine Translation.

    In this talk, we presented challenges and success of our pseudo-localization tool, the kind of issues that are detected by the tool, as well as the use of it as an education tool to engineering and UI/content designers. We also discussed the documented increase in quality since integrating the tool with development, design, and CI processes.

    Other authors
    See publication

  • What is your GPS?

    International Unicode Conference 38

    At PayPal, we've developed a Globalization roadmap for our development teams to follow and a system to track and grade the maturity of our products.

    In this talk, we presented the Globalization Maturity Model (GMM) which divides i18n capabilities into groups providing a roadmap of i18n support to be developed.

    We also presented the Globalization Product Scorecard (GPS) which is used to track and grade the maturity of global-readiness in our products.

    The GPS at PayPal is…

    At PayPal, we've developed a Globalization roadmap for our development teams to follow and a system to track and grade the maturity of our products.

    In this talk, we presented the Globalization Maturity Model (GMM) which divides i18n capabilities into groups providing a roadmap of i18n support to be developed.

    We also presented the Globalization Product Scorecard (GPS) which is used to track and grade the maturity of global-readiness in our products.

    The GPS at PayPal is composed of three measures: the level of i18n maturity according to the GMM, a globalization quality score, and a global product management score.

    Other authors
    See publication

  • Multilingual Transliteration Survey

    28th Internationalization and Unicode Conference

    In the expanding European Union, a majority of people speak at least two languages. Even so, official documents, phone books, bibliographic records, and other digital repositories may need to present native language source information (e.g., Russian or Greek) in a transliterated form to allow it to be interpreted by someone who does not speak or read that language. This paper presents a survey of issues confronting the language engineer along with solutions and available…

    In the expanding European Union, a majority of people speak at least two languages. Even so, official documents, phone books, bibliographic records, and other digital repositories may need to present native language source information (e.g., Russian or Greek) in a transliterated form to allow it to be interpreted by someone who does not speak or read that language. This paper presents a survey of issues confronting the language engineer along with solutions and available technologies.

    This paper looks at historical standards and contexts in which the standards become useless. It then looks at early work funded by the Directorate General for Research of the European Union (DG-XIII, 4th Framework), then on to solutions provided by Java and software libraries.

Patents

  • Graphical User Interface Language Localization – a context-aware system for automated dialect learning and dynamic content selection

    Issued US 11610192-B2

    An interactive cross-language dialect discovery learning system.
    Graphical User Interface Language Localization

    Systems and methods for predicting language dialects for a user to improve a user interface of an application are disclosed. In one embodiment, a system receives a request to determine a default dialect for an application executing on a user device. The system acquires user information corresponding to a user of the user device. Based on the user information and using a…

    An interactive cross-language dialect discovery learning system.
    Graphical User Interface Language Localization

    Systems and methods for predicting language dialects for a user to improve a user interface of an application are disclosed. In one embodiment, a system receives a request to determine a default dialect for an application executing on a user device. The system acquires user information corresponding to a user of the user device. Based on the user information and using a clustering algorithm, the system assigns the user to a cluster associated with a dialect. The system provides the dialect to the user device for display in a user interface as part of a sliding scale of selectable dialects of the application such that the dialect is provided as the default dialect for text and other message communications in the application. The system learns from the user's choice of dialect to provide more accurate dialect predictions in the future for other users.

    Other inventors
    See patent

  • Client/server database system with methods for multi-threaded data processing in a heterogeneous language environment

    Issued US 5787452

    A system providing improved National Language Support (NLS) in application programs is described. The system employs normalized Unicode data with generic transformation structures having locale overlays. Methods are described for navigating the structures during system operation, for effecting various transformation processes using locale-specific information. The locale-specific information is maintained in the structures as external data files. Since the data files are read in at runtime, the…

    A system providing improved National Language Support (NLS) in application programs is described. The system employs normalized Unicode data with generic transformation structures having locale overlays. Methods are described for navigating the structures during system operation, for effecting various transformation processes using locale-specific information. The locale-specific information is maintained in the structures as external data files. Since the data files are read in at runtime, the underlying binary files which comprise the program need not be modified for updating the program to support a new locale. The approach provides extensibility to applications with National Language Support. Additionally, increased portability is provided, since manipulation of the underlying data remains unchanged regardless of the underlying platform. Program maintenance is also decreased, since engineers need only maintain a single core.

    See patent

  • Client/server database system with methods for improved soundex processing in a heterogeneous language environment

    Issued US 5758314

    A system providing improved National Language Support (NLS) in application programs is described. The system employs normalized Unicode data with generic transformation structures having locale overlays. Methods are described for navigating the structures during system operation, for effecting various transformation processes using locale-specific information. The locale-specific information is maintained in the structures as external data files. Since the data files are read in at runtime, the…

    A system providing improved National Language Support (NLS) in application programs is described. The system employs normalized Unicode data with generic transformation structures having locale overlays. Methods are described for navigating the structures during system operation, for effecting various transformation processes using locale-specific information. The locale-specific information is maintained in the structures as external data files. Since the data files are read in at runtime, the underlying binary files which comprise the program need not be modified for updating the program to support a new locale. The approach provides extensibility to applications with National Language Support. Additionally, increased portability is provided, since manipulation of the underlying data remains unchanged regardless of the underlying platform. Program maintenance is also decreased, since engineers need only maintain a single core.

    See patent

Projects

  • Moderator: Internationalisation Assessments

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    Participation in a panel of experts on internationalisation and localisation to discuss the measurement of globalisation compliance. The panel consisted of Paul-Henri Arnaud from Autodesk, Mike McKenna from Yahoo!/Zynga, and Leandro Reis from Adobe. Moderated by Gary Lefman from Cisco

    Other creators
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  • Multilingual Application Interface for Telematic Services

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    I led MAITS, a consortium formed to specify an Applications Programming Interface (API) for multilingual applications in telematic services. A number of telematic applications, such as X.500, WWW, X.400, internet mail and data bases, designed to use this i18n API and products were planned to be implemented using the API. MAITS was approved for funding under the CEC 4th framework programme.

    See project

Languages

  • Japanese

    Elementary proficiency

  • German

    Limited working proficiency

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