Globalization blog

SDL continues its ambitious build-out of technology solutions for end-to-end content globalization with its acquisition of XyEnterprise, announced on 29 June. From Gilbane's perspective, it's a win all the way around, especially for buyers who continue to seek solutions for the more difficult obstacles to multilingual, multichannel publishing.

The vendors win. The acquisition brings immediate scale to both XyEnterprise and SDL Trisoft. Both companies were having to work really hard to reach the next level, and both were at risk of very slow progress through organic growth. The deep expertise and market focus of each company are highly complementary--SDL Trisoft with DITA and high tech, XyEnterprise with S100D in aviation and aerospace and a proven track record in commercial publishing. SDL Trisoft gets solid North American support and professional services organizations, and XyEnterprise gains the ability to better serve customers in Europe.

Buyers and customers win. First, the consolidation of two of the leading suppliers of component content management gives buyers a new comfort level with vendor viability. Second, efficient, affordable multilingual, multichannel publishing remains a very expensive obstacle for many global 2000 companies. In Gilbane's new research on Multilingual Product Content, we identify the multilingual multiplier--costs that are solely the result of producing formatted content in another language. SDL XySoft will be able to address the multiplier problem with tight integration of the XyEnterprise XPP publishing engine, which has been a true differentiatior for Xy throughout its history. Third, existing and new customers will benefit from the extensive combined experience that SDL XySoft has in complex, standards-based publishing and content management. 

The acquisition is also an opportunity to reinforce the core value propostions for XML and component content management. These technologies and practices sit at the nexus of a set of knotty problems: reusing content across applications, repurposing content for different outputs, and translating content for multiple global audiences. A single-vendor, integrated solution that addresses these problems is more evidence that the market is finally making progress towards overcoming the language after-thought syndrome, identified in Gilbane's new study. Such solutions support the trend towards the:

". . . steady adoption of content globalization strategies, practices, and infrastructures that position language requirements as integral to end-to-end solutions rather than as ancillary post-processes." -- Multilingual Product Content, Gilbane Group, 2009

This acquisition should be relatively easy for SDL to absorb, as there's already an established business unit into which Xy's capabilities fit (in contrast to SDL's acquisitions of Trisoft and Tridion, which were completely new businesses for SDL). In addition, SDL XySoft has a proven leader in former XyEnterprise president and CEO Kevin Duffy. Duffy takes the role of XySoft CEO, reporting directly to SDL Chairman and CEO Mark Lancaster. Duffy managed to build a small niche software company into a respected player in its market, surviving through good and bad times. He now get his chance to see what's possible with the resources of a global organization behind him.

See the SDL press release and the XyEnterprise press release for more information. Gilbane's study on Multilingual Product Content: Transforming Traditional Practices Into Global Content Value Chains will be published on the Gilbane site in mid-July. The report is currently available through study sponsors Acrolinx, Jonckers, Lasselle-Ramsay, LinguaLinx, STAR, Systran, and Vasont.

Positioning content practices as strategic, making business cases that get funding, and selling up within the organization are among the most common challenges presented to Gilbane Group analysts in conversations with users, adopters, and buyers of content technologies. Our advice to clients always includes aligning the target investment with the strategic goals and objectives of the business. By placing content practices and infrastructures directly in the path of promises to customers and shareholders, managers improve their chances of securing financial and sponsorship support. In some cases, they can effect innovative change that not only advances their domain’s capabilities but also results in new value creation for the enterprise.

Gilbane believes that true innovation delivers new value to organizations that are willing to take the risks associated with fundamental, qualitative change. The innovations resulting from FICO's alignment of product and content development practices with business strategies are object lessons for any organization that needs to compete effectively in global markets.

Download the FICO story here: Innovation³: The FICO Formula for Agile Global Expansion

Listen to the webinar archive here: Innovating for Agility: Global Content Practices at FICO

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 -- 11:00 to 12:00 (GMT -5:00) Eastern Time

* To check the webinar time in your local area, go to: www.timezoneconverter.com.

The challenges facing FICO, a leading supplier of decision management analytics, applications and tools, will sound familiar to global organizations: the need to streamline product and content development lifecycles, support global expansion with accurate and timely localization and translation processes, and satisfy customers worldwide with consistent, quality experience. What makes FICO’s story unique is its strategic and proactive approach to addressing them.

With a successful business case based on reuse as a “first principle,” FICO is building an enterprise content infrastructure that includes XML and DITA, component content management, translation memory and terminology management, and automated publishing. Learn how FICO is aligning global content practices with the company’s business goals and objectives. If you need to spark that “aha!” moment within your organization, you won’t want to miss this webinar event. Topics:

• Reuse as the tipping point: the synergies of component approaches to product and content development
• Implementing an end-to-end global information strategy
• The value of content agility in FICO’s global business strategy

Speakers:

• Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group
• Carroll Rotkel, Director, Product Documentation, FICO
• Howard Schwartz, Ph.D., VP Content Management, SDL Trisoft

Registration is open. Sponsored by SDL.

I was recently talking with a CEO of a company which operates in several countries all over the world. Not surprisingly, they use English as corporate language. But although they assume that new employees can work in English, there are differences in their fluency - and that can lead to misunderstandings, or people spending more time in communicating and understanding issues than they would in their own language.

I asked whether they tested the level of English skills when new employees were hired. It turned out that a tailored test based on the special terminology of their industry and also of management would be helpful in defining their skill level. After all, most of us would describe ourselves as fluent speakers of a language - but fluency is a very movable beast. Having spent most of my professional life writing an reading in English, I still manage to make errors of various seriousness practically every day. At times, such errors really obfuscate the meaning.

I repeat myself, but to me, the real future of the language business is in all the various new and yet even unimagined tools and solutions for employees working in a multilingual environment. As we exchange messages and develop ideas across contries, cultures and languages, we need new and faster ways to cross the language barriers. Using crowdsourcing for multilingual needs will open up interesting possibilities, just like in Google Translate where users can suggest a better translation.  Similar applications for crowdsourcing multilingual solutions inside companies and industries should proliferate.

Btw., an interesting point was made by another person responsible for training in a large global organization. He remarked that using social media in training allows them to evaluate the results better: they can tap into the conversations of the community and trough them see what people have learned and where they need to improve the training. Great idea!

At the recent Worldware Conference in Santa Clara, California, I was delighted to learn about how a high-tech company was achieving great success in internationalizing their software through crowdsourcing. The story gets more interesting. This was not back-room software plumbing but an innovative application, none other than Second Life, a virtual world and a social-networking MMORG (Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game).  Launched by Linden Lab in 2003, Second Life enables its users, called residents, to interoperate with a virtual world  through software called a Second Life Viewer. Residents can socialize, participate in group activities, and create and trade virtual property.  According to Google, there are over 9 million residents currently on Second Life.

I attended the presentation, “Brave New (Virtual) World,” and had an opportunity to catch up with Danica Brinton, Director of International Strategies and Localization at Linden Lab.  Here’s what she had to say.

Kadie:  When did Linden Lab realize the importance of internationalization?

Brinton: Around the middle of 2008, Linden Lab realized some discrepancies between U.S. and international business.  While 60% of the residents and twice the new registrations were from outside the U.S., revenue and retention numbers, while still healthy, indicated a gap in the localized  user experience.

Kadie: What happened when you entered the scene?

Brinton: I joined the company in June.  When I checked things out, I was stunned.  I discovered that we were paying $40,000 per quarter to LSPs.  What were we getting?  The viewer was translated only partially into 3 languages, and was nearly incomprehensible.  The website was translated partially into 2 key languages.  In both cases there were a lot of localization bugs.  On the flip side, hundreds of wiki-based Help pages were translated quite well into 8 languages, which was pretty darn good.  An interesting trend…

Kadie: So what did you do?

Brinton: Although we were a small company, when I showed my management the opportunity they were very supportive…but with limited funding.  So we had to get creative.  We enlisted the help of power users to translate the application and website.  To ensure quality control, we set up a repeatable localization framework, with translation, editing, testing, and end user review.  We established a tier system of resident translators, drawing on our super-users.   We built and acquired localization tools to manage translation memories and the localization process, and installed a locale-based ROI calculator to manage costs.  Finally, we hired 3 in-house linguists.  So you can see, it was a hybrid of crowdsourcing from the Second Life community on the one hand, and our in-house linguists and contracted translation agencies on the other.

Kadie: How did you divide up the work?

Brinton:  Who did what depended on the language tier.  Let’s look at the viewer, for example.  For tier-1 languages, we developed the glossary, did the translation, and collaborated with the Second Life community on the editing, QA, and some of the glossary.  For tier-2 languages, the Second Life community did nearly everything. 

Kadie: What kind of results did you achieve?

Brinton: Less than a year later, I can truthfully say that we achieved some dramatic results.  We now translate the viewer and the website into 10 languages, and expect to reach 16 in May.  The active residents from outside the U.S. grew to 64% of the user base, and new registrations are now more than 2.5 times the U.S.  Even better, international revenues have surpassed U.S. domestic revenues.  Between the Viewer, the website, and the knowledge base, we now regularly localize over 150,000 words per language.

Kadie: What’s next for localization at Linden Lab?

Brinton: Strangely enough, past is prologue.  This new localization program is helping to increase customer satisfaction and bolster an affinity group.  You can even say that community-driven translation is building brand advocacy.  Some of the elite power users are evolving into business partners.  Localization is not only supporting our business, it’s helping to grow it.

The Content Globalization practice at the Gilbane Group closely follows and  blogs on the role of multilingual communication in social networking (see interview with Plaxo).
 

Although the focus of next week's Worldware conference in Santa Clara, CA, is on global software strategies, the event is on Gilbane's calendar because demand for localized product content naturally follows demand for localized software.  

A number of the topics on the Worldware agenda resonate with us as relevant across both software development and content development domains within global enterprises:

• Understanding localization scope and costs
• Business cases for why localization should remain a strategic focus, especially in uncertain economic times
• Cross-cultural user experience
• Web globalization and social media trends
• Modeling agile software development practices to enable faster-time-to-market for technical content

Gilbane Senior Analyst Karl Kadie will be onsite and would welcome the opportunity to meet with Gilbane readers.

Worldware is produced by Localization Institute and MultiLingual Computing, Inc., Gilbane's partners in education for language and content management professionals. Collaborative efforts this spring include our participation in Localization World 2009 in Berlin (June 8-10) and a session on community translation at Gilbane San Francisco developed in conjunction with Localization World.

After a long pause, I am happy to be back as a guest blogger here!  The quiet time was well spent, though: last year I co-authored a book on using, and especially about how to start using, social media in corporations (www.wikimaniaayrityksiin.blogspot.com). Available only in Finnish, I am afraid, but for a good reason: when talking about a new topic, it IS important to write in the language of the audience to introduce it.

Over the years I have heard both pros and cons about using local language. Some say that it is much better to write everything in English: wider audience and discussion, no need to invent translations for concepts. Others are as adamant about the fact that non-native English speakers are better off reading about a new topic in their own language to understand the concepts. For me, there is no right or wrong answer; both are needed.

Another very nice event was having Frank visit Finland last fall to give an excellent talk at the KITES seminar. KITES is a Finnish association for multilingual and multicultural communications; more about it in later blogs.

Almost, but not quite. However, I can attest to submerging myself at the end of December, and just now feeling like I am at a balancing point re: projects, speaking gigs, maintaining Twitter, diving a bit into Facebook for personal connections, remembering to check in with LinkedIn, and plain 'ol but never quiet email.

I can say with confidence that I have not reached Twitter addiction, and never considered myself a "crackberry". But... I can see how the road winds toward the seemingly endless forums devoted to this subject.

OTOH, there's a twist to this pending information overload, and it is so much more about being engaged than about being bombarded. Thus, the allure of social media. That engagement thus far has put me back in touch with old friends, spawned new ones (who I'll likely never meet), and business-wise -- helped to further a brand around the investment we've made since 2007 in raising the awareness of and best practices for content globalization.

So here's a few things I've learned. TweetDeck's been integral to my social media overload tendencies (and has a translate feature.)  Twibs is a great way to find businesses making the most of Twitter. "Getting 1000 followers," although certainly exciting in a kinda addicting way, is not really my ultimate goal. But Mr. Tweet seems to think otherwise.

And here's a few more related to "why social media in the enterprise?" This is the stuff I find intriguing and pass on here, there and everywhere. Hmmm, is there a mantra there? There's more than a few resources that stand out. Of course, our own 2008 Collaboration and Social Media and perspective on social media impact in our 2008 Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative reports.  I also find Ed Yourdon's free Using Twitter in the Enterprise slideshare a great summary. And on the subject of branding, find @GabrielRossi, @problogger, and @brandingexpert spot on and intriguing. And of course our good friend and researcher extraordinaire, Nora Barnes from the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

So my road continues -- and given my passion, I'm building a list of references and stories on the multilingual impact in social media. Got one? DM me @lciarlone on Twitter or comment here...

Check out the recorded version of our most recent webinar, Broadening Product Lifecycle Management: A Strategy for Multilingual Product Documentation.  

As moderator, a couple of things stood out for me. One had to do with the way we choose to run our webinars; basically the goal is conversation rather than playing  "Powerpoint Karaoke" (a phrase I loved while perusing the Localization Unconference site.) So although every webinar I participate in has plenty of coordination and practice, the conversation "the day of" always brings out interesting threads as a result of unfettered discussion.

In this case, Jeff Kennedy, Manager, Engineering Information and Systems at Ingersoll Rand, Club Car was kind enough to provide detail on methodologies to help calculate projected monolingual and multilingual content reuse levels, an often difficult task for any operational champion.

Vern Hanzlik, CMO from Sajan, provided clarity and perspective on how strategic globalization partners help organizations evolve in ways that make business sense, align technologies with corporate goals, and pinpoint opportunities for change. Hanzlik's comments speak directly to a "loud and clear" message from our Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Organizations Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain report. Organizational expectations for Language Service Providers to increase their value across the Global Content Value Chain outside of a specific component are growing, without a doubt.

My colleague Karl Kadie walked participants through the stages of our Global Content Value Chain Maturity Model, offering participants an opportunity rate their own companies according to the GCVC MM.

So, in my humble opinion, a quite interesting and revealing discussion. And one worth listening to. Access it here.

There is a new newsfeed URL you should use for this blog - http://gilbane.com/globalization/atom.xml. It is not actually new, but it will be the feed we maintain going forward. The feed some of you are using - http://feeds.gilbane.com/GlobalizationBlog - is being phased out.