Re: Regarding ICANN Language Services

["Brights_Partner_Team" <partner@xxxxxxxxxx>]

July 31, 2012

Dear All,

Our company, Brights Consulting Inc., would like to make an official request 
regarding the languages that ICANN employs for its official communications. We 
would like to appeal that ICANN included the Japanese language as the 7th one 
it uses for translation and interpretation.

Brights Consulting is an intellectual property consultancy with its 
headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. We represent a large number of corporate clients, 
most of whom are multinational corporations originating from Japan. To date, we 
assisted the application process for 19 Japanese new gTLD applicants (22 
strings) in their efforts to secure a .brand TLD.

Please note that Japan currently has the largest number of applications in Asia 
and is the second after USA by number of “pure” applications from a country. In 
total, there are 71 ASCII applications from Japan, for generic, community, 
geographic, and brand terms.

Japanese applications are uniquely homogeneous and very diverse. Every single 
application from Japan is represented by an organization or company within 
Japan. For comparison, out of 85 applications from Luxembourg, 76 are made by 
an American company.  British Virgin Islands have 70 applications by an 
American company out of 72. A close look to the landscape of applications by 
country will show that the situation repeats - the cases of Switzerland or 
Ireland, for instance, are the same. Thus, if we calculat
e the number of “pure” applications from each country, US will be the first, 
followed by Japan and Germany. Furthermore, in case of the applications from 
Japan, there are no monopolistic trends with a single company trying to secure 
a large number of TLDs for e-commerce. In this sense, it is different to, for 
example, 91 applications from Cayman Islands that have 54 ones coming from one 
company.

Japan, thus, is willingly embracing new trends such as new gTLDs. With its 
vibrant Internet community of over 100 mln Internet users (top 4 in the world) 
its potential in Internet industry is huge. The Japanese Internet community 
would benefit greatly from the Japanese language being among the languages of 
written and oral materials of ICANN. Adding Japanese language would also 
connect to the growth and diversification of the Internet in general.

Importantly, English is not widely spoken as a second language in Japan (as, 
for instance, in Europe), thus availability of materials in Japanese is crucial 
and could, for the first time, truly promote the understanding of ICANN mission 
and its initiatives. It would also increase participation rate of Japanese 
Internet community representatives and new gTLD applicants in the ICANN 
meetings.

Finally, we believe that if the explanatory materials about IDNs were available 
in Japanese as a part of a more active communications campaign, we would have 
witnessed a number of applications for generic IDNs from Japan. Please note 
that currently, there are no Japanese IDNs by a Japanese company/organization 
and the IDNs in Japan are applied for by the American companies, who are by far 
more well-versed in the matter due to the availability of all the materials in 
their native language.

We hereby conclude our request and will greatly appreciate your kind 
consideration. Brights Consulting Inc. is willing to assist ICANN in working 
out the strategy related to the implementation of the Japanese language as an 
additional official language.

Yours Sincerely,
Brights Consulting Inc.

><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
 Brights Consulting Inc.
 7F PMO Hatchobori,  3-22-13 Hatchobori,
 Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0032, Japan
 TEL.+81-50-5536-4005  FAX.+81-3-3523-0338
 http://brightsconsulting.com/en/
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