As many of our writers in this issue point out, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is an interesting localization market — and it’s possibly for that reason that it feels trendy in spite of the fact that we’ve been covering it for years.

Part of it, as they say, is location, location, location: the collective CEE geography has landed its countries in political upheaval over the decades, and currently, their wealthier neighbors to the west have an emerging business relationship with them.

Jerzy Nedoma begins the focus with an overview of the region’s economy and industry, covering everything from currency to bureaucracy to corruption. Don DePalma aids the piece with a sidebar on CEE’s most-needed languages. Elena Rudeshko, Maryna Babich, Lyuba Lazarenko and Katia Kosovan provide further insight into Slavic localization, and Alfred Hellstern, Katerina Gasova and Libor Safar offer some notes from their experience with updating Microsoft’s terminology and tone for the region. Then Serge Gladkoff makes the argument that CEE’s visible market is just that: the visible part, with more hidden and more on the way. In short, CEE may still be trendy for a while.

In our columns, Kate Edwards takes a geographer’s look at Apple Maps, John Freivalds talks about invented languages and Terena Bell discusses beer. Or rather, how language service providers are like beer, and what they can learn from that particular industry. Lori Thicke interviews Ghassan Haddad about Facebook’s crowdsourcing efforts, and Marek Makosiej covers three reasons for choosing a single language vendor: control, consolidation and cost. In our Takeaway, Sonia Monahan details the results from ForeignExchange’s industry straw poll about translation quality, which generated some heated discussion among participants.

Elsewhere, Hannah Berthelot reviews MemSource Cloud, noting that cloud servers such as this are “the future — not to mention the present — of data storage.” Ultan Ó Broin writes about improving user experience through context of use and locale-specific information gathering. Finally, Lori Thicke gives us an article about machine translation and customer support.

We trust that you will find the issue as trendy as it is interesting.