February 2007 Archives

Carnegie Mellon University, one of the top-ranked institutions producing technology talent, recently announced that it will offer a new Masters of Science program in software management at its Carnegie Mellon West campus in Mountain View, CA. The driving force is our increasingly global economy.

The school recognizes that going forward, developing good, useful software won't be sufficient for managers who want to excel. The curriculum combines software engineering, one of CMU's sweet spots, with business and organizational coursework. The goal is to prepare graduates for the reality of the software business in the 21st century. James Morris, dean of Carnegie Mellon West, says that the program's "... cross-training gives our students the perspective and contextual understanding they need to see and seize opportunities in the global market.”

The deadline for applications is June 1. See the program description in the Carnegie Mellon West brochure for details.

In my previous entry I wrote about the effect of working in a foreign language. I think that we will see interesting developments in tools and services targeted to people who need to work in a language other than their native language - simply because this is a rapidly growing group. Obviously there are more and more non-native English speakers using English daily at work. But as European call centers relocate to Poland and the Czech Republic, we will also see more people using German as their second language.

An interesting question is: what will happen in China and India? According to Wikipedia, India has 23 official languages (one of them is English), 800 spoken languages and 2000 dialects. In China, there are 6 to 12 main regional groups of Chinese, according to classification. A friend of mine said that China could choose English as their official langauge, just like in India. I am not quite so sure. With about 800 million Mandarin speakers, maybe we will all be learning Mandarin in the future.

Anyways, I checked the most popular blogs from Technorati, http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/. The top 30 "most linked to" blogs included 8 blogs in a language other than English. To me, this is just a reminder that there is a world outside English.

The recording from our February 14th webinar, "Integrating Translation and Content Management Workflows" is now available here. Many thanks to Steve Billings, Senior Solutions Engineer with Idiom Technologies, and David Smith, President of LinguaLinx, for joining me for the conversation and of course, to the participants for attending.

We informally polled participants during our last webinar on globalization business drivers and published the results here. In this webinar, we asked the question again. Here's the results:

We also added a new poll specific to integrating translation and content workflows. Here's the results:

Clearly the subject of this webinar was right on for participants, with 21% citing "integration of CMS (content management systems) and GMS (globalization management systems) as the number #1 headache. The good news is that there are a number of market approaches to cohesive workflow integration for translation processes. We've provided details on our definitions of Levels 1-3 here. Steve and David presented a typical customer scenario involving all three integration levels during the webinar. Check it out.

If so....

The LISA Forum Asia in Beijing on March 12-15 will focus on buyers/end-users of globalization services. Entitled "The Globalization of China 2.0," the program features some of China's international expansion leaders alongside high-tech multinationals such as Microsoft, Huawei, Cisco Systems, Nokia, Adobe Systems, TIBCO Software and IBM.

The program includes sessions such as "The Basics of Going Global: Understanding Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation," "Buying and Implementing Content Management and Global Translation Management Systems," and "How to Run a Globalization Audit of Your Business Processes." Register here.

For those of you not going to Beijing, note that the LISA Forum's highly-popular globalization audit session will also run at Gilbane San Francisco on Tuesday April 10th during pre-conference tutorials.

In my previous entry I said that I think multilinguality should be a strategic issue for companies. When companies operate globally, they should think about the impact of languages on customer satisfaction, internal efficiency, increased sales, feedback from product support to prodct development etc., instead of just looking at translation costs.

For compliance alone, language can have a huge effect. What if your Chinese subcontractor did not understand your English instructions properly, and made a serious mistake? Who is responsible? How do you ensure or measure the language understanding level of your subcontractors or employees in other countries?

I would like to welcome comments on this issue. Is it enough to say "Our corporate language is English" and that takes care of it? Does the personnel all over the world speak English so well that this is a non-issue? Do non-native English speakers spend more time reading and writing in English, and would it be easier using one's own language?

I know several Finns who say they prefer to read everything in their special field in English, as that is the language in which they have learned their speciality. Is this the norm, or would working in own language be preferable? (When talking about working, I mean both writing and reading in a language.)

How big is the language market? The most common answer is: we can't tell. The difficulty arises from deciding what to include in the market. Outsourced translation? Language schools? Translations done inhouse (of which there is typically very little measured data)?

Common Sense Advisory http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/ gives a good analysis on the size of the localization market. Their estimate for the global outsourced localization and translation market is $9 billion, reaching $12 billion by 2010. They also point out that this is about the size of the global bicycle market, which puts things into perspective.

My thinking is: multilinguality has much more impact than that. Do not get me wrong: I am all for bicycles. I am also convinced that there is a huge need in the global market for more solutions to handle the growing multilingual needs. The trouble is that companies still often see languages as an afterthought and as a cost, not as a way to increase sales, customer satisfaction, internal efficiency etc. Multilinguality has not reached the strategic level it should have - but we may be getting there!

Translating content for multiple global markets is a complex effort that involves a variety of technologies, business processes, and internal and external contributors. In 2006, we researched more than 40 companies in the global content management market, including language service (LSPs), content management (ECM/CM), and global information management (GIM) providers.
The research revealed that there are various market approaches to the integration of translation and content management workflows. We've categorized them into three levels, summarized as follows:

• Level 1: workflows are autonomous for the most part, characterized by email or FTP-based transfer of source and localized content with some amount of automated notifications. There is little if any access to or reuse of translation memory. Although there is often automated assembly of content object(s) that require translation, we call this level the “handshake approach” to underline the dependence on human-driven, manual business processes.


• Level 2: workflows are integrated at the API level to achieve bi-directional communications, enabling automated assembly, transfer, and auditing of source and localized content based on workflow state changes. Building on the Level 1 approach, this eliminates dependence on email attachments as well as FTP site management. In addition, there is a strong focus on access to and reuse of translation memory.


• Level 3: workflows support and extend a Level 2 integration and provide more opportunity for translation memory reuse. Focus in this approach is less on interoperability and more on visibility into process and project management. Visibility capabilities can include bi-directional query on project status and cost, integrated task management and collaboration, and combined reporting. Usability is key in this approach, with emphasis on accessible capabilities directly from user interfaces.

The Gilbane Group is having a conversation on February 14th with Steve Billings, Senior Solutions Engineer with Idiom Technologies, and David Smith, President of LinguaLinx about the reality and value of integrating translation and content management workflows. Join us! If you can't make it, feel free to submit a question via a blog comment and we'll do our best to address it.

Webinar Event: Integrating Translation and Content Management Workflows
Date: February 14th, 2007
Time: 1:00pm Eastern, 10am Pacific
Duration: 1 hour
Register here