March 2009 Archives

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...