June 2007 Archives

Your day in the sun may finally be dawning.

While preparing for an upcoming webinar on technical publications in global markets, we reviewed the content/globalizaton management topics that we've covered recently in white papers, case studies, and other webinars. An emerging--and insistent--theme is the role that product support content plays in the nearly universal drive for positive customer experience.

This signals an important shift in the value proposition for investment in content technologies for
technical documentation. One that should warm the hearts of techpubs pros everywhere.

Historically, companies have spent money on technical publishing technology in order to realize operational benefits--more automation, content reuse, lower headcount, and so on. The value proposition was inward-facing. Now, however, value is increasingly derived from outside the operations of the organization. High-quality technical content impacts customer satisfaction, drives new revenue in new markets, enhances product usability, and reinforces brand. The value prop is now outward-facing. And these dimensions of ROI can pour a whole lotta sunshine in the corner offices of worldwide organizations.

In addition to the July 11 webinar with Idiom and EMC, check out these Gilbane artifacts for evidence of the value shift in technical publishing.

From the Autodesk case study:

Regarded as a strategic and essential company asset, product documentation is a significant component of the company’s customer-centric information supply chain. With over 60 percent of revenue derived from outside the United States, Autodesk’s vision for content globalization is paramount to continued market leadership.

See also the Sun Microsystems case study and recorded webinars with Medtronic and Astoria.

The results are in -- and they're not surprising. Well, actually one is. A mere 35% of respondents indicated that their companies have a formal brand management team. The result to our second question, "Does the team include a localization or translation subject matter expert?" was a resounding 100% "No." This, unfortunately, is the "not surprising" part. Although our N was smaller than we'd like, we expect that the trend would have continued on the same course.

The fact is, most companies have work to do to ensure that corporate brand flows through multi-geographical market segments in a way that's both consistent and relevant to customers and prospects in specific cultures and locales. It's not easy. According to Economist Intelligence Unit, authors of Guarding the Brand, almost half of their respondents believed expanding into new territories made brand management all the more difficult. The top two challenges? 63 percent cited cultural differences and 44 percent cited language barriers and translations issues.

It's sometimes "easier" to avoid dealing with the presence of some 4000+ languages worldwide, but it's not so easy to ignore when one investigates the facts in smaller "chunks" so to speak. Consider this list of "The 50 Most Widely Spoken Languages" as a more easily digestible example.

If your company aims to expand footprint and revenue generation in this "flat world," globalization needs to be a part of the brand management discussion. And if you are responsible for leading the charge into a new geographic region -- you need to have a voice that's heard.

I was only able to make it into the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston yesterday. You can still get a demo pass for today. But I was thrilled to hear analyst, researchers, case study presenters, and yes, even vendors, drill down into one of my favorite phrases: "people, processes, and technology make it possible" and hope the mantra continues today.

Point being, obviously, that 2.0 not just about technology ;-). Its about culture, filling generation gaps, the evolution of *people* networking, and redefining community from the core of where community starts. Humans.

What I didn't hear, however, is the "L" word -- specifically language, and that bothered me. We just can't be naive enough to think that community, collaboration, and networking on a global scale is solely English-driven. We need to get the "L" word into the conversation.

My globalization practice colleague Kaija Poysti weighs in here.

With Web 2.0, companies can have increasingly extensive dialogues with their customers. Customers can also talk about the company and its products among themselves, whether the company likes the discussions or not. A growing number of solutions is available for blog monitoring and analysis from companies like Nielsen Buzzmetrics and Umbria.

It will be interesting to see how these solutions will handle the language issue. As social networks will provide new types of business intelligence (see this PC World article for some examples and tips from Umbria) companies need to be able to monitor blogs and discussions in several languages, and then bring the information and insights to their employees and partners in several countries. This will need a lot of automated multilingual searches and translations, as the amount of blogs and conversations to follow is huge.

Or perhaps I am wrong; perhaps English will take over, and companies only need to monitor blogs and discussions in English. Hmm... I would, however, place my bets on solutions that can also monitor Spanish, Chinese, German, etc., discussions. Actually, if I was entering a new geographical market, I would certainly want to monitor the discussions in the language of that market.

When we launched this blog in January, we had high hopes for creating an interactive community that encourages participation. We still do. Since interactivity breeds interactivity...

Welcome to our inaugural "Poll of the Week." This week's topic? Globalization and brand management.

4 questions,
30 seconds,
Promise.

Just a short entry to add to my previous thoughts on translation quality. As national members of the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) are implementing the EN-15038 standard for translation quality, the following two articles provide good background reading:

Juan José Arevalillo Doval describes the history behind the standard in http://www.translationdirectory.com/article472.htm.

In http://www.lisa.org/globalizationinsider/2005/03/quality_from_th.html, Alan Melby describes how quality should be built from the ground up.

As these articles point out, quality should be built into the processes which are used in producing translations. If the translation process has high quality, the end product (the translation) will also have high quality. And with high quality I mean meeting the customer's expectations, not some absolute high quality.

Customers do have very different assumptions about the quality they expect to receive. Finding out what those assumptions are, and creating a solution to meet them in a way that allows also the translation vendor to stay in business is essential both for customers and for vendors.