Recently by Kaija Poysti

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!

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.

I keep being fascinated about the role of language in social media. I read a very interesting article on multilingual social bookmarking in the Just Landed web site. English is extremely dominant in social bookmarking, although a lot of the English sites also contain bookmarks to non-English sites. Among the non-English sites, German dominates. I also noticed that there are multilingual Indian social bookmarking sites which include several Indian languages.

Is social media actually compartmentalized by languages? Christian Kreutz has an excellent entry in his blog about the multilingual social web. As he says: "So it is a dilemma. On one way English allows us to communicate worldwide, but at the same time it narrows down the potential for collaboration by simply contradicting cultural diversity."

I would guess that more social and customer-generated media will eventually mean more machine translation, because it would be nice to share thoughts over the language barrier. Or I might be quite wrong, and most of the discussions and social sites will actually be quite local, shared by people who already share a language. Language is, after all, more than words: it is also culture and connotations and nuances, some of which are impossible to translate.

It would be interesting to hear from the MT community: do you see increased demand from social media sites?

Most of us have probably encountered user guides and manuals where we would have wanted to add some clarifying points. Even more so when the manual has been translated, sometimes less than accurately (that happens).

Now here is a thought: what if a product manufacturer would put the manual on the Web in a wiki format? That way, the end users could revise the text from the actual end user point of view. Then, an experienced technical writer, editor, or translator would edit the input to produce the "final" version or print, although the process could even be continuous. The result could be a better manual and the manufacturer would get yet another contact point to customers.

A similar model is already used, e.g., in newspapers where readers can enter news through their own blogs, and editors then pick and edit the pieces to be included in the paper. So why not at least experiment with some consumer product manuals? After all, Web 2.0 is a great place to try out new ideas!

Although it is already mid-January, I would still like to wish everyone a very good 2008! It definitely looks to be an interesting year.

Back to blogging, after a very long pause. The reason was my major geographical transition: after 8 very nice years in Boston, we returned to the bi-lingual Finland and the very multi-lingual European union last autumn. The time required for a trans-Atlantic move is not to be underestimated!

Leonor's interview with Director General Lonnroth about the languages in the EU is an excellent description of the world on this side of the Atlantic. On a very personal note, I love tuning to YLE Mondo radio every time I am driving; a local station broadcasting news from several different countries. I even get the NPR! I listen to German, French, Spanish, and Italian news, and at the same time notice the differences there are not just in the language, but also in the content. Even more fun is to listen to news from Australia and South Africa, which really change the world perspective. A good reminder that from Africa or Australia, many things do look different than from the US or from Europe. How lovely it would be to understand what they say in Chinese, Japanese or Arabic, to name just a few languages!

Anyways, things are finally starting to find their places in their new home, so I am back to blogging. We had a wonderful Gilbane conference in Boston at the end of November; it got so many ideas going in my head, especially about the social aspects of content, search, collaboration - and of course language. The question "Where are languages in social media" was asked in the conference, and the first answer was on the lines of: gee, that is a tough thing to solve. True - and yet I am convinced that we will begin to see very new types of tools and solutions. It was interesting to note that several examples were given on how in corporations social media enabled people find a language speaker inside the organization. "Through our collaboration tool, we found someone who speaks Japanes and can check our translations." "We realized someone in our German office could translate the materials we needed." Language skills become yet another skill to be shared in communities.

Another interesting point was that MT and its usefulness came up. With the amount of user-generated information exploding, there is no chance to human-translate everything. Could this be the real coming of age of MT?

I spoke with one multilingual service provider who said that they have started receiving requests for checking user-generated content in corporate community sites. Interesting. I would guess that need for automated checking of "bad words" increases as more content on corporate sites comes not from employees but from anyone in the web. Enterprise searches have to be multilingual, but there is always room to improve.

As Leonor pointed out: collaboration yields knowledge. That knowledge is multilingual.

I have said this many times before, and will say again: the world is multilingual, and more and more people are working daily in a multilingual environment. In companies, this multilingual environment is not only about translation, but about working with customers and colleagues whose native language is different from one's own. That can lead to a lot of miscommunication, and I think that nobody has even started to measure the real costs or missed sales arising from it.

Communication starts with terminology, and that is where I see a lot of needs (and opportunities) for new solutions. Corporate terminology - "that which we call a widget by any other name goes in other companies" - is something that I think benefits from active input from corporate experts. Wikis seem an interesting way to enhance corporate communication, so I emailed with Greg Lloyd, CEO of Traction Software to ask whether he has seen wikis used for handling multilingual issues. He can be reached at grl@tractionsoftware.com.

Traction Software has been in the corporate blog/wiki business since July 2002, and has 250+ corporate customers. According to Greg, Traction's TeamPage is best described in terms of Doug Engelbart's NLS/Augment model, re-imagined for the Web (more at Traction Roots | Doug Engelbart.

KP: Do your customers use wikis to handle multilingual issues, such as terminology?

GL: We have an international pharma customer who wanted to provide an interactive online glossary of terms that have specialized meanings. For example, in writing a new drug application, many terms have specialized meanings and interpretations dictated by regulatory authorities in the U.S., Europe and other regions.

At this customer, glossary definitions are usually written by people with specialized experience in new drug applications and similar filings, but the glossaries are intended for working reference by everyone in the company - not limited to those who deliver translations. The company has offices around the world, but most working communication is in English or French. A majority of employees have very good reading knowledge of both languages, but aren't necessarily aware of some specialized meanings and interpretations - including those which change as new regulations are issued.

We developed a "Glossary skin" to address this need. The Glossary skin is a Traction "skin" or UI presentation layer that in this case, provides a specialized and simplified Glossary view of the underling blog/wiki data stored in the TeamPage Journal. It gives the users versatile tools for handling terminology, such as looking up glossary terms, term definitions, guidance on how to use the term, and the possibility to comment a term or ask questions about it. All terms are in both English and French. Changes and additions can be tracked with standard blog/wiki features, and the users can also subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds on updates. These are just a few of the functionalities of the solution.

KP: Do the wiki glossaries integrate with other glossaries or localization tools, such as translation memories?

GL: For the Glossary Wiki there are no special translator tools built in. I believe that general purpose translation tools will likely best be loosely-coupled mashup style. I haven't seen requests for industry specific glossaries from customers, but I think there may be a business opportunity.

KP: What kind of feedback have you received from your customer? Have there been requests for special functionalities?

GL: The pharma customer is very happy with the result, which is used company-wide. We've also demonstrated the Glossary skin to customers in Japan and other countries. Several have expressed interest and are piloting use of the Glossary skin, primarily for developing and delivering specialized glossaries for internal working communication as well as translating deliverables.

The ability for global enterprises to create interactive Glossaries for working communication among employees, suppliers and other stakeholders seems to be getting the most interest. Many global companies use English as a standard for internal communication, but the ability to add comments or questions in other languages is a big plus. The ability to create and delivery interactive Web glossaries in Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. as well as European and other Asian languages is also very useful.

Traction uses UTF-8 Unicode to store, search and deliver content written in any combination of European and Asian alphabets in any blog/wiki space (or in the same page), so a multi-lingual global glossary is easy to deliver and can be simple to author using the standard Web browser interface.

KP: What have been the biggest advantages your customers have received from using a wiki to create a glossary, instead of using a specialized terminology management tool?

GL: The biggest advantages are: 1) Simple access using a Web browser, particularly when the wiki has specialized skin to make the Glossary application work with no training; 2) Simple group editing and history using the the wiki edit model; 3) Simple integration of comments and feedback; 4) Simple, scalable and secure deployment corporate-wide.

KP: Corporate wikis seem to be an interesting way to share information and expertise. Do you see them also being used for translation work?

GL: Yes, I can certainly see how the Glossary skin could be extended to support other wiki per-page translation models. At present the Glossary skin implementation is available to TeamPage customers as a Traction Skin Definition Language (SDL) plug-in. We'll be packaging it along with its SDL source code as a free plug-in example later this summer. We'll work with customers and partners to determine how to best provide translation wiki's powered by Traction TeamPage.

In a global economy, corporate employees increasingly need to communicate in foreign languages, whether in sales, internal meetings, customer support etc. I spoke with Janne Nevasuo, CEO of AAC Global, one of the relatively few localization and translation companies which also offers language, culture and communications skills training. A year ago it was acquired by Sanoma-WSOY, a major stock-listed European media corporation with operations in over 20 countries.

KP: How long have you been in the language training business?

JN: We started with language training already 38 years ago, so we have a very long experience. We offer language training services only to corporate customers, and currently train about 20,000 people every year. For the past 20 years, our language training business has been growing about 15% annually.

KP: So you started with training, and moved to translation later?

JN: Yes, we added translation and localization services, as our corporate training customers started to ask for help in translations. As we have always focused only on corporate customers, it was a very natural growth path for us, helping our customers to handle all their multilingual needs.

KP: What are the main languages you give training for?

JN: English is by far the biggest language, and has been that for practically all the time we have been in business. About 70% of our training is on corporate English, as English is the “universal second language” in business. Demand for Russian is growing continuously.

KP: That is interesting, as so many people now speak English and learn it at school!

JN: That is just the point: school English is not enough for corporate use. Companies need to get their message through to their customers, employees, and partners in several different situations: presentations, meetings, negotiations etc. One can only imagine both the direct and indirect losses accruing from miscommunications and misunderstandings, when people cannot communicate efficiently in English.

KP: So which do you see as the biggest trends in language training?

JN: First of all, corporate language training is actually “substance training”, i.e. training employees about the company’s product or service in a foreign language, and about handling different situations, such as negotiations or presentations, in a foreign language. So corporate language training is rather far removed from language learning at schools; we focus on the substance, key terminology and message.

Another important trend is that language training needs to become part of everyday work and daily processes. The learning should happen without the student actually realizing that he or she is learning, and it should happen during the actual work, using actual materials and doing actual tasks. Nobody has time to go to even a one-day separate course.

New technologies are brining us more efficient solutions for this, such as the extensive terminology tools AAC Global offers. I would like to point out, though, that this does not mean only teach-yourself language learning, as it does not work for everybody. Innovative solutions combining self-paced and tutored learning are needed.

KP: Is language training bought only by big companies?

JN: Certainly not. Companies of all sizes need to communicate in foreign languages, so we serve companies from small to huge global companies. A very important thing to understand is this: nowadays more and more employees in a company need to communicate in a foreign language, regardless of their task. 10 years ago there were a few designated people in the company, typically in the export department, who needed to speak another language. Now practically everyone needs a foreign language, whether in sales, support, business intelligence, marketing… and also when communicating with the company’s own people and partners in other countries.

According to research we have done, people spend up to 1 hour per day looking for the right term or doing a translation. There is thus a lot of room for efficiencies in daily work processes to help people become more multilingual. Actually in large corporations, language training is also part of their HR process, so that the HR department participates in getting just the right kind of language training to each employee.

KP: In previous blog entries, Leonor and Mary talked about the emerging markets. How do you see them?

JN: We have worked especially with Russia and the former Eastern bloc countries. The need for training corporate English is enormous there; typically the companies there have a few people who are fluent in corporate English, but then there is a large gap. Many young people have studied English at school, but still need training in corporate practices and terminologies. Still, these are the same needs as in all other countries.

A quick addition to my previous entry about the language requirements inside the European Union: New Approach Standardization site gives a list on EU directives for 22 product types at http://www.newapproach.org/Directives/DirectiveList.asp. Omnilingua has made a good summary on the language requirements of these directives at http://www.omnilingua.com/resourcecenter/eulang.aspx, although their list contains only 18 product categories.

Having a look at one of the directives, such as http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:31989L0106:EN:NOT, also gives you an idea about the amount of translation work that happens inside the EU. All the directives have to be available in all EU languages, which keeps translators busy. It could also give the Europeans an advantage in developing solutions e.g. for multilingual content management.

Still, the thought of the US being a monolingual country needs to be revised, too. Spanish has become the second language in the US, with practically all the big companies offering customer service and printed materials also in Spanish. Once a company needs to offer even just one additional language, it will need solutions for handling multilinguality. It is also good to remember that a big part of multilinguality is verbal communication, which requires multilingual personnel. This will create interesting requirements for language teaching both at schools and at work. More on that later.

In her entry on brand management, Leonor gave a link to the 4000+ languages of the world, all of which have speakers buying things and thus being prospective consumers. The largest language groups are obviously interesting for all companies, but sometimes even small languages are worth noticing.

I recently spent a few days in Reykjavik, which is an interesting city. Iceland, with its 300,000 people speaking Icelandic, is number #13 in the GDP per capita list of CIA Worldbook https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html. Reykjavik was definitely showing the its high position in the GDP list, with its very nice restaurants and fashion and jewelry boutiques. All the young and middle-age people seemed to speak very good English (much like in my home country Finland), and all information was available also in English. But everything was also written in Icelandic – of course.

So, even a small amount of native speakers can be a good reason for translation, if those natives are affluent. Or who knows? Maybe after a few decades everyone in Iceland is happy to receive all their information in English? I would not bet on that, however.

As regards to the European Union, it has legislated what must be translated if you want to sell your goods and services to an EU country. Here are some links for more information:

http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l32036.htm is the European Union site which gives a summary on the EU legislation. To get some of the legalese in a more comprehensible text, you can have a look at the summary put together by the Australians at http://www.export61.com/export-tutorials.asp?ttl=eteu. And Sophie Hurst of SDL has put together a good summary at http://www.sdl.com/printer-friendly/localization-information/white-papers-articles/white-papers-list/white-papers-europe-legal.htm.

To summarize all these summaries: if you want to sell your product in the EU, always translate consumer information, such as user manuals, labels etc., into the local EU language.

As a final note: My sister in Finland had just bought a new dishwasher. It came with a bunch of manuals in different EU languages. Although ecologically it seemed a waste of paper, that is what one gets in EU now from big manufacturers. It seems to be cheaper to deliver manuals in several EU languages to consumers, instead of sending just one printed manual in the correct language. A good process in logistics might change that...

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.