Recently in Collaboration Category
I distinctly remember asking this question to my peers (and to myself!) at various companies throughout my technical writing career. Lots of times I got the same question as the answer. And most times, the "who's go it" discussion occurred in the midst of a post-mortem point release meeting or as a result of a technical support inquiry based on conflicting documentation narrative or procedures.
I worked with an exceptional group of writers during the late 80's through the mid-90's. We were dedicated to accuracy, consistency, reusability, and making sure that Engineering and Quality Assurance never forgot where we sat. We were pioneers at the time in achieving single-sourced print, electronic, and online help documentation without the benefits of mature commercial tools. When managing the translation of documentation products, we spent lots and lots of time on the phone. We were stressed. Highly stressed.
For all our good intentions, a paper-based Style Guide complete with change pages and various scribbles in the margins to document new decisions didn't cut it. Rigorously-developed templates and in turn DTDs, did not deliver the foul-proof uniformity insurance we imagined. After all, we were creative and passionate writers! Bound by common goals for quality, but invigorated by the chance to innovatively describe complex and technical subjects in new and interesting ways ;-). Unfortunately for our translator-counterparts, there were times it just didn't compute.
I've shown my age by reminiscing as a "that was then, this is now" exercise. Content creation and in particular, managing team-authored product support content has come a long way. Social computing technologies will undoubtedly take it even farther. What I'm most impressed with now, is the availability and value of authoring assistance (as opposed to absolute control) that brings a living, breathing corporate Style Guide into the technical writing and translation environments without disrupting creative flow or requiring re-training.
Join me on April 9th to discuss the value of authoring assistance with technology provider across Systems, language services provider Argo Translation, Inc., and Quad/Graphics, a customer reaping the benefits of authoring assistance technology in a FrameMaker environment.
One of the blogs I read regularly is penned by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Chairman Emeritus from the IBM Academy of Technology. A 37-year IBM veteran (and recent retiree as of May, 2007) Wladawsky-Berger writes on innovation, corporate culture, knowledge management, and as you would expect, technology. Usually thought-provoking, I've been re-visiting a particular entry while observing "the winds of change" in the content and translation management software industries.
In this entry, Wladawsky-Berger writes, "While it is easy to focus on the global, universal aspects of the successful innovation hubs - great technologists, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists - they miss the very local, human elements that make it all work." Words close to my pet peeve, the significance of the triad of people, process, and technology in global content management strategies. IMO, it is no mistake that this age-old expression lists people first, technology last, and process as element that ties the two together.
Truly localized content, more than just red = rojo, is impossible to produce without cooperation, collective responsibility, and the premise that "differences still matter" and perhaps the world isn't so flat after all. (Wladawsky-Berger's entry spurred me to purchase Pankaj Ghemawat's book, Redefining Global Strategy, published this past September.)
When globalization is an incidental black box in the process model with planning and execution relegated to the final stage of product support or web content delivery, the local part of globalization disappears. Granted, even the power of the Internet does not erase the fact that merging collective, culturally-aware, and local expertise is hard. But hey, collaboration has always been hard, simply because it's not about technology, it's about motivation, feedback, a sense of responsibility, a feeling of community -- you know, all those human complexities.
We believe social computing has the energy to encourage and enable innovative collaboration in global content management, but even these applications will face the user adoption test: usability and relevancy to the task at hand. We're off to find some of the most intriguing examples of success. Got one? Comment here and stay tuned.
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!
More than likely. One of her more famous quotes was:
If Fuller was still alive, would social networking have forged a connection somehow with Jaap van der Meer, Director of the Translation Automation User Society, otherwise known as TAUS? I'd bet money on it.
Long known as a language industry pioneer and visionary, van der Meer directs the TAUS-driven call for knowledge sharing as the driver of change for the translation industry. Efforts such as:
- spearheading a language data sharing initiative, including a planned platform for cross-industry sharing
- providing executive forums to discuss and design new translation business models, and
- mapping the roadmap to share translation memories
are just a few examples of the innovation within this proactive organization.
Since November 2004, TAUS has managed to bring together more than sixty companies that exchange user cases, best practices and technology roadmaps specific to the language industry. The resulting membership is far from a "weighted" crowd; rather, it is a well-rounded collection of end users, service providers and technology vendors with a shared interest for change.
This mission statement for 2008 defines how TAUS plans driving an "agenda of change" that stimulates innovation, automation and collaboration for the industry. Impressive goals, to say the least. Find out more by requesting a copy of the TAUS Annual Plan 2008. It is an excellent read.
Globalization is a strategy rather than a project. Global customer experience is a mindset, not a deliverable. In turn, supporting these objectives requires complimentary strategic initiatives driven by subject matter experts that utilize a range of rapidly evolving processes and technologies in innovative ways.
Based on our community discussions, organizations that focus on combining the practices of localization design, content management, and translation management achieve results. And that focus in no way equates to a series of siloed application implementations.
We believe there is no better way to demonstrate this truth than by encouraging collaboration and promoting success stories. Agree? Here's two opportunities to do so, in the form of a Call for Papers for synergistic events:
Gilbane San Francisco: June 17 - 19, 2008
Localization World Berlin: June 9-11, 2008
Collaboration yields knowledge. Sharing experiences spurs innovation for all organizations. Here's your chance to contribute -- our experience shows that it's well worth the effort.
As we close our first year of the Gilbane Globalization blog, we looked back at our initial goals to help readers meet the challenges of multilingual business communications. Three conversations stood out as emerging themes that we felt were critical then -- and now:
- Understanding the impact of globalization on customer experience and brand management
- Viewing the global content lifecycle as a strategic business practice
- Closing the gap between content and translation management processes
Communicating the importance of each drove our 2007 blog entries, our conversations with corporate users and technology vendors, our globalization-specific case studies and whitepapers, and the design of the Globalization Track at Gilbane Boston 2007. As we did so, our favorite mantra continued to bubble up as the ultimate success criteria:
Our conversation wish list for 2008 is very "PPT"-driven. In fact, we can't think of any theme that does not require a collaboration of people, an interoperability between processes, and an integration of technologies:
- The power of single-sourcing to redefine "multi-channel" as more than device-driven outputs.
- The impact that human + machine translation combinations can have on the availability and quality of multilingual content.
- The value of terminology management in combating the proliferation of insulting translations.
- The potential of multilingual social networking.
And last but not least, the availability of "the wisdom of the crowds," or from our take, global access to shared best practices that enable organizations to learn from each other in attaining quality multilingual communications. We'll aim to make sure that goal is ongoing.
A: When its a huddle.
Q: When is a huddle an environment for multilingual communication?
A: When a huddlee can dynamically change the user interface to work in her native language.
Q: Why is this interesting?
A: Because we've yet to see a concentrated focus on globalization requirements in the social computing and collaboration space. In fact, we've been wondering where is the "L" is in Web 2.0?
Q: What if you don't speak German?
A: The company that built and manages the huddle concept (Ninian Solutions Ltd) provides a French user interface as well and according to our interview with the company, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese will follow.
Q: So how will content created by huddlers get translated?
A: Machine translation may very well prove its use within a Web 2.0 environment. Stay tuned.
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.
One of the unique aspects of the translation and localization industries is the breadth of contributors and skill sets that actually get the work done. I remember standing in line last summer for the ferry to Ellis Island and marveling at the number of languages being spoken simultaneously and the number of cultures represented in one huge line. But for that moment, (2 hours actually) that line was a community with a single purpose. Despite language barriers, everyone shared the excitement of the historical adventure to come.
No, the San Diego-based WorldSummit organized by Idiom Technologies didn't offer a cross-country trek to the Status of Liberty. It did however, offer an opportunity for an impressive group of professionals with multiple skill sets and cultural backgrounds to come together and share the excitement of where the industry is heading and what it can achieve along the way.
Blending technical writers, brand managers, and marketers from varied organizations with translators from multiple countries, LSPs, university professors, industry researchers, and analysts is no small feat. But for that moment, (3 days actually) WorldSummit fostered community and conversation amongst those who research, those who groom the next generation of translators, those determined to author source content with globalization in mind, those faced with the nuances of dialect and locale, and those who provide the services and technologies so necessary for this complex work.
With Mary and I both attending, we got to compare notes and reactions as we moved through various user sessions, informal conversations, and social events. One clear pattern we both noticed is the power of human connection; IOW, the power of face-to-face, passionate conversations. Without belittling the impact of Web communities, I am standing firm on the notion that there's nothing like eye contact, body language and the sight of folks waving their hands to speak to fuel the adrenaline of a community conversation. It's positively contagious. Here's some examples of the adrenaline I'm talking about:
- Mary's user panel, "Evaluating and Selecting a Globalization Management System – Best Practices," included real-world advice from Brian Shorey - Cisco Systems, Alma Siller - Continental Airlines, and Mimi Hills - Sun Microsystems. This was not a panel of "nirvana" stories told through predefined slides; this was an honest and thoughtful discussion of the approaches each participant used to pave the way for success (including some colored commentary on the challenges to expect along the way!)
- Keynotes on translation quality and the future of technologies were passionately delivered by well-known researchers such as Jaap van der Meer and Alan Melby. The wealth of history these two brought to the table resulted in many a cramped finger as the audience scribbled furiously.
- Machine translation's potential to resolve time to market challenges and its intersection with human expertise was absolutely hot, as John Yunker notes over at Global by Design. Whether more acronyms are useful or confusing, it is quite clear that the pool of worldwide translation talent may not be able to keep up with demand.
- And I'll not soon forget the students from Kent State University and California State University Chico, who cheered their professors with more enthusiasm than I've seen at a technical conference for some time.
Whea. Documenting the varied participants and choosing my highlights was tough enough. Pulling off the event was surely another story. Kudos to the Idiom team for achieving a well-rounded and extremely organized event.
Now available! "Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn't Work, by Stephen Arnold
