Recently in Standards Category

In July of this year, WeLocalize launched the GlobalSight Open Source Initiative, offering the industry's first open source version of enterprise translation management software. WeLocalize plans to release open source GlobalSight in January, 2009, and is committed to supporting LISA standards Translation Memory eXchange (TMX) and Segmentation Rules eXchange 2.0 (SRX). GlobalSight also recently announced a partnership with ClayTablet Technologies to enable connectivity with content management systems.

Is this just another marketing initiative searching for a way to differentiate common technology? Early indications are that there's a real movement afoot. Over 200 people from 147 companies have joined this open source community, and the steering committee contains many high-tech leaders, including Cisco, EMC, IBM, Autodesk, NetApp, and Sun Microsystems. Sun, for example, has a long history of embracing open standards and open source. Sun has staked its future repeatedly on open standards and open sources, ranging from the early days of UNIX and Java to today's OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, Java, and, now, Open Translation centering on XLIFF standards.

To be sure, this is an impressive list of companies. But the basis of these companies' interest is not entirely clear, and the adoption history for open source solutions across the value chain of content technologies has been fragmented at best. Open source content management software is still in the early stages of acceptance and open source authoring software has yet to take significant market share.

In the end, global corporations and organizations determine value and standards. So we put the question to you: WOULD YOU CONSIDER ADOPTING OPEN SOURCE TRANSLATION, AND WHY? Please comment on this blog or send me email with your ideas. Let's continue this conversation...

At the end of March, the W3C announced the launch of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Interest Group (IG) as a forum to foster a community of users that promotes the tag set's adoption and further development. Like Unicode's CLDR initiative, the emphasis on community interaction and collaboration underscores the ever-increasing, Web-driven impact of cooperative spirit.

As the Web nears its 20th birthday, we would imagine efforts such as ITS IG continue to be music to the ears of its inventor and W3C founder, Tim Berners-Lee. This particular interest group is certainly not the first nor the last of the educational and outreach efforts the W3C has launched since 1994.

It is also not the first nor the last of the activities from W3C's Internationalization (I18n) Activity, known worldwide as simply I18n. The mission? "To ensure that W3C's formats and protocols are usable worldwide in all languages and in all writing systems." The goals? Ensure universal access, support the internationalization and localization of documents, and help reduce the time and cost associated with internationalization and localization projects. Consistent and admirable objectives, described eloquently by Richard Ishida, Activity Lead for the I18n Core Working Group in his article, It's All About Customer Focus.

I18n accomplishments include a treasure trove of information from specifications and recommendations to educational materials to the newest initiative, hosting the Planet I18n Blog aggregator. Worth checking out; give yourself time to stay a while.

The Globalization Track's "Understanding the Globalization Standards Landscape" session provided a trio of experts to content management professionals wading through the industry's "alphabet soup" of authoring, translation, and integration standards. Moderator Kaija Poysti deftly led the audience on a road trip through a multi-dimensional standards landscape with more than a few controversial roadblocks.

The mission was to understand how a standards-driven strategy provides an impact on customer experience, provide expert guidance on which ones really matter, and take-away advice on what to ask when evaluating solutions. Panelists Don DePalma from Common Sense Advisory (CSA), Andrew Draheim from Dig-IT!, and Serge Gladkoff from GALA delivered on the mission and then some, with commentary on which are practical, which are simply theoretical, and most importantly, which have a positive impact when adopted. Highlights:

• On a "standards reality check": "You have no choice on some; Some are about good hygiene, but little used; and others are not ready for prime time in their current form. However, the code and content ecosystems definitely need an injection of globalization DNA." Don DePalma, CSA.
• On standards benefits: "Adoption can decrease the internal cost of doing business, decrease typical business risks, facilitate business interactions, increase the value of services to clients, save on R&D and business development, and save on internal personnel training. However, there are too many private standards and too few generally-adopted public standards. Standards are notoriously difficult to develop and upon completion, they compete; be warned though, the "winning" standards not always the best ones." Serge Gladkoff, GALA Standards Committee Chair.
• On synergies between content and translation management: "When these technologies work together, it streamlines processes, reduces duplication and errors, and makes publishing easier. Which standards will be around tomorrow? Take a look at Translation Memory eXchange, Segmentation Rules eXchange, XML Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF), and TermBase eXchange." Andrew Draheim, Dig-IT!.

Many thanks to our panel for guiding our audience through the globalization standards landscape with candor and real-world advice.

Crimson Life Sciences, a division of TransPerfect, Inc., recently announced that it has been certified by Underwriters Laboratories as compliant with ISO 14971, the "only international standard for risk management for medical devices." According to UL, "ISO 14971 has become an integral element for satisfying regulatory requirements in most major markets." Crimson's certification relates to risk management processes for translating medical device labeling and documentation.

The announcement caught our attention because medical device manufacturing is one of the verticals on the Gilbane globalization practice radar. It's a huge market in which significant opportunity is spread across the globe. Just one proof point: according to RIC International, "25% of medical devices produced in the US are exported, with diagnostics comprising the largest export sector." As such, this vertical is generating a significant amount of the demand for solutions that integrate content management and translation process management in a global content life cycle. Which is why it's of particular interest to us in Gilbane's globalization practice.

Medical device manufacturers face some of the most rigorous challenges associated with content translation. They must create, translate and publish product support content that describes medical devices, documents proper procedures, complies with global regulations, and enables best practices. The risks associated with poorly translated content are particularly onerous for these companies. Crimson Life Sciences recognized this and went the extra mile have its risk management methodologies for translation validated by an international certification authority.

An important sub-theme here is quality of translated content and translation processes. Today, quality measurement is a mix of science and art (science in the case of industries with established standards such as SAE J2450 in automotive). Crimson's UL certification is another step towards taking some the mystery out of quality verification.

The issues of multi-lingual content, translation processes, quality, and brand management come together in a case study on GE Healthcare that Gilbane will publish this fall. We're also working on a white paper that identifies opportunities to insert quality improvements into the global content life cycle. For insight into content-related business issues in medical device manufacturing in the meantime, see our case study on Siemens Medical, and check out the archived webinar we did earlier this summer with Medtronic. We'll also be covering quality and the global customer experience as the theme of the globalization sessions and keynote at Gilbane Boston 2007.

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...

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.

To continue my previous entry on quality: what, after all, is the cost of quality? When I was a localization service vendor, customers always emphasized the great importance of good translation quality - and yet most sales negotiations always boiled down to "What is your lowest price per word?"

Finally, a few customers actually measured ALL their translation-related costs, including the hours they themselves spent on checking and re-checking the translations they received. That, of course, should be the real cost to be used when comparing vendors, not just the price per word or per hour.

Getting the translation right the first time improves quality and reduces cost through less iterations needed for checking and re-checking. But getting it right the first time also requires good translators who know the subject matter and the required style, good background materials, terminology lists, style guides etc. - also called preparation, a step often overlooked due to great urgency of having the translation done asap. "There is never enough time to do the thing right, but there is always enough time to do it again." Ah well.

Getting it right the first time naturally also requires my favorite, favorite topic: a well-defined PROCESS. Something I will keep returning to in this blog...

Quality is such a fun topic to discuss. Good quality - and bad - is instantly recognizable, but difficult to define. I bet that everybody who has been involved in a translation project, either as a customer or as a vendor, has had discussions about translation quality: how many mistakes there were, what was a mistake and what was just a difference of opinion, what related materials and terminology lists were given beforehand, and so on.

Quality issues can be very frustrating to both customers and vendors, and they definitely affect the profit margins of both. It would be great to have a clear-cut definition of a good translation, a "six-sigma of language". The problem is that quality is very much about perception. Yes, there are the typos and grammatical errors, which are easy to define and to spot. But then there is style, and the question of whether the intended message was conveyed or "lost in translation", like Bill Murray in Tokyo. And that is where the slippery slope begins.

Eventually good quality means that the target audience received the message its provider intended it to receive. In the translation industry, this also includes that the correct message was received in time and within the translation budget.

LISA has done a major effort to establish a QA model which is described on http://www.lisa.org/products/qamodel/. The LISA QA model helps to quantify some of the quality issues, and gives a tool which customers and vendors can share in their discussions. Most importantly, it has been developed in co-operation by end users, software and hardware developers, and localization vendors, so it accumulates their joint experience.

One can, however, quantify only so many qualitative issues. The rest - the more elusive "perceived issues" - tend to fall under customer relationship management.