Getting familiar with the big picture

I will be prospecting clients at the PV Expo 2009 this week. I am doing some preparation ahead of time, getting familiar with the big picture of the subject. This is not new only I have time and I am not under pressure because I won't be doing interpretation but probe the floor for potential. Let's say you are not familiar with photovoltaic power generation, or to use another conventional expression, solar batteries. Where do you start with? Wikipedia, overview web sites, news articles. All these are valuable but pretty much scattered. A book is a more systemitized media. One nice thing with books in Japan is the plethora of books for the non-specialist at a non-specialist price. So I browsed over Amazon then grabbed my hat and went to the book store because you need to flip before you buy. In standard format, anything that is less than ¥2000 is for non-specialists. I located about 5 books for the non-specialist and simply chose the latest delivery just published a few days ago. There is no coincidence that a new book on PV is released at the time of the PV Expo. Newspapers will be hot with the subject which is indeed a hot one. I hope I can grab somme background literature at the show as well. I checked before I bought it the word index at the end because I was intended to try and make a quick homemade glossary. A too long index would be useless. But non-specialist books usually come with the right number of words in the index. It did take some time, entering about 180 words in Google spreadsheet. Now I copied the column and pasted it in WWWJDIC. It took more time from there because the pasted column was not coming with hard returns after each line, so I assume this messed up with the word recognition process. It took too much time for the cleaning but I ended up with a fairly filled up bilingual glossary. I had to check orphan words in the ALC dictionary too when WWWJDIC failed. More than once, both failed but I now have a 98% bilingual glossary with an estimated correctness rate of 75%. Now I am ready to quickly read the book in Japanese, augmented with a few magazines articles in English. Again, the purpose is to get the big picture, not to pretend acquire a doctorate level in a few days. With this preparation, I will feel confident not to get lost, show some level of understanding and hopefully start some conversations with the foreign exhibitors I will try and get in touch with to talk about their need - not at the booth - for interpretation service later on.