A Book was translated to Chinese.

Last month, I got an e-mail from John Wiley and Sons that told me Chinese translation of my book was newly published in China. That made me a bit surprise since it was my first experience and I had not anticipated such a chance.

The original book entitled Next Generation Mobile Systems: 3G & Beyond , which I edited in 2004, San Jose California has been being priced at $130.00 and sold more than 10,000 copies. I'm not sure of the exact number; presumably it was between 10,0000 and 20,000. The point which I'd like to note here is that the figures are much more than a typical average number of technical books being sold in Japanese. A Japanese well-known publisher told me that the market size of Japanese technical books was so small in comparison with books written in English. A typical number of Japanese books is about 1,000 or less. The publisher added one advice that authors who were going to publish technical books had to push out the books by marketing those through their organizations such as companies and universities. That implies every professor has to sell his/her books by designating those as text books in the lectures.

Japanese as minority in technical publication will be a serious issue in Japan, the country that has a mid-size market in the world. The size is unsatisfactory, and between self-satisfactory and English-dominated. The more English is used for global publication, The less countries' original languages are used. German is an example, where you can't find German academic papers in information technologies. Let's flip the coin there. Good news for German is that they have been globalized as Singapore, Scandinavian, and others. China can survive on their own language for a while because of their large volume of the market in publication.

The translation which I introduce here symbolizes "English As a Lingua Franca" and "Chinese As another Lingua Franca."

Anyway, I may publish my lecture note as a text book soon. The language is firstly in Japanese ...