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Apple recently unveiled its new iPad device with a flourish of global PR. iPads will go on sale in the U.S. around the end of March this year, and in other countries in the following months. Press and analysts have had a field day praising and condemning the iPad's capabilities and features, predicting (depending on who you listen to) that the device will be either a terrible flop or another runaway success for Apple.

My analysis predicts that Apple will sell millions of units of its new "universal media device," as analyst Ned May of Outsell Inc. describes it, but Apple's success is not my subject today. Instead, it's a warning: People who generate content for global markets need to know how the iPad might make their work more difficult.

The problem is caused by a technical gap the new iPad shares with its older siblings, the iPhone and the iPod touch. None of them can use Adobe Flash. (For more on Apple's deliberate omission of Flash and its consequences, see this New York Times story and this one.)

Thousands of global businesses use Flash movies with captions or voiceover narration as quick, relatively low-cost ways to present marketing videos and user guides over the Web to multilingual audiences. For these businesses and the agencies that work with them, the Flash gap is a growing problem. Instead of Flash movies, millions of iPhone and iPod Touch users see blank white spaces. The iPad boasts a larger screen, with display capabilities that will be attractive for business tasks. But all those millions of Flash animations and interviews and guides and other videos will be invisible. Just blank white spaces, no matter what language you speak. That is the Flash gap, which the iPad will make worse.

The alternative is to deliver videos using HTML5. But not all web browsers work with HTML5. Neither do all devices, especially mobile devices. This means Web video providers need to research what specific devices their target audiences use, and what video technology those devices will support.

So if you provide multilingual video content, you have one more detail to pay attention to when you plan your schedules and budget.

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).
 

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...

Recently, we had an opportunity to catch up with Emmanuel Garcin, Vice President at Jahia, a Swiss-based vendor of open source solutions for web content and portal management. Jahia is a sponsor of Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative," a report released by Gilbane's Globalization practice in July.

KK: What have been the biggest roadblocks to companies in demonstrating value for multilingual communications initiatives?
EG: We've found that web content management systems often need to be customized - in a big way - before they can be integrated with authoring tools, translation management systems, and other enterprise applications. This can result in big-ticket licensing and implementation costs as well as IT departments that become concerned with "overloading computing platforms. Open source technologies can help with these obstacles, but companies are often challenged to adopt and rollout new business models that go hand in hand with the open source context.

KK: What is the "tipping point" that compels companies to move forward with your solution as part of the infrastructure for multilingual communications
EG: The key business driver is a burning need to broadcast both local and global messages for brand management. We also have customers that must address language-based government regulations. Since there are three official languages in Switzerland, Jahia's Swiss origins naturally focused us on the implementation of adequate business logic to provide flexible language management tools to accommodate this need. Other customers have a need to mix languages when they publish a particular country or regional site. One example is a large international institution that publishes in over a hundred languages who found that Jahia provided the vitamins (enterprise & portal capabilities) and the painkiller (globalization capabilities) needed to implement its content globalization strategy.

KK: What do you do to educate, prepare, and enable customers to be successful? EG: There's a lot of back and forth. Companies often want to shape new solutions around existing business rules, but they also need to plan intelligently about how they're going to communicate globally, and determine which processes should continue to evolve. We educate and train organizations on how to get the best results and can help with planning, installation, and configuration. At the end of the day, it's all about technical details. Companies want to manage content in any language, decide for themselves which languages are mandatory and which are optional, and even publish web sites that mix languages on the same screen. In addition, they want to give their customers the ability to select a new language through a simple, easy-to-use interface.

We spend a lot of time communicating a vision of successful web communication. We talk about how content repositories are the new databases, that all content should be dynamic, and how successful enterprise applications need to be function and feature-rich. We make sure companies are fully aware of industry trends that affect global communication practices and common standards, such as JSR-170/283.

KK: What have been your customers' best practices in building a global content value chain?
EG: You can't overlook the significance of having a globalization strategy in the first place! Examples of success that I'm familiar with include a large international agency, a GPS vendor, and a global glass manufacturer. The most successful companies are equally concerned about which solutions for multilingual communications they choose, and how they roll them out; about a single source of content, along with information that is customized or added to meet regional needs. They have a globalization strategy that strikes the right balance between centralized and regional content management.

What is most important, however, is to define how that strategy relates to business needs. A good example of this is a pan-European government agency that we work with. A particular document may be mandatory for certain countries and languages but irrelevant for others. To address this challenge, they prepare source content in a single language, deliver translations up to 25 languages, and publish local language sites with different, additional or custom content for a variety of regions and countries.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Regina Bustamante, Director of Globalization with Plaxo, to discuss the company's content globalization strategy and how Plaxo users are integral to its success. Plaxo offers a suite of online solutions for social networking. Top services are the address book and calendar applications in addition to Pulse, a sharing and networking tool.

KK: How has the growth of global web access affected the adoption and development of your social networking solutions?
RB: Plaxo's user base continues to grow steadily since we reached the 15 million user mark back in October 2006. As a result, our product release cycles have accelerated from two or three months to just one week. At the same time, Plaxo's non-English base of users and users with international connections is growing rapidly. Shorter product cycles coupled with user demand for multilingual products made it necessary for us to explore new ways to release products to major markets in local languages.

KK: What model did Plaxo use for its initial localization/translation efforts?
RB: We localized our address book and calendar tools into French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Simplified Chinese over a year ago, using LSPs for the initial translations. We then provided early release versions to specific "power users" in each international market who reviewed everything, including the UI and suitability to local cultures.

KK: So Plaxo users provided quality assurance in this effort?
RB: Yes, users were even willing to test and report on features such as sorting, name and address formatting, etc. When Pulse was released with localizations into the same languages, non-English users continued to send suggestions, comments, and to act as informal quality control agents. The involvement of the user community improved the quality of local versions of our software.

KK: The Dutch version, released in July, increased the role of longtime power users, correct?
RB: Absolutely. The Netherlands has quickly become one of the largest markets for Pulse and we expanded the involvement of the user community, relying on a group of long-time Plaxo members for the development of the Dutch glossary.

KK: What's in store for the future of Plaxo's localization/translation efforts?
RB: For future product releases, we will move to a crowdsourcing model based on a translation portal we are developing that will enable any Plaxo community user to submit and comment on translations. To ensure high levels of quality, this portal includes separate roles for a language moderator and project manager.

KK: What will be the key to success for this model?
RB: Plaxo's position as a provider of no-charge consumer software helps us to engage users for localization/translation assistance. The key is to only ask users to help with things that directly benefit them. Our crowdsourcing model is not intended to entirely replace LSPs. For example, we have no plans to use crowdsourcing to translate the corporate website or documents such as the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy.

The holy grail in translation is the speed versus quality dilemma. That creates controversy. Here's what we've noted after posting our Multilingual Social Networking Alert citing Facebook's crowdsourcing effort:

• Article: Facebook asks users to translate new versions for free
• Video: Facebook's Spanish Translation Misses the Mark
  
• Blog: No, Getting Users To Translate Facebook Into Other Languages Isn't Exploitation
  
• Article: Facebook's Community Translation: Savvy or Just Cheap?
  

No doubt that these references are the tip of an iceberg. How to say "poke" in different languages is clearly not the only conversation going on. And BTW, here's Facebook's Translation Application.

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!

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.