Month: December 2006 (Page 1 of 2)

The recording from our December 13th webinar, “How Sun takes Brands and Solutions to the Global Marketplace” is now available here.
Many thanks to Kristen Harris, .Sun Content Management Engineering Manager, for an excellent discussion of Sun Microsystems’ Starlight Platform for content and translation management. The companion case study is available here.
Our informal poll during the webinar on the most significant business drivers for providing localized content to customers yielded some interesting results:

Brand management and presence in emerging markets (examples given were India and China) were primary drivers for the audience. It’s not surprising to see emerging markets in the number 2 position since the U.S. market is essentially saturated for many industries. It’s also validating to note brand management in the number 1 position. Much of our webinar discussion focused the value of content within the global customer experience. Clearly, that’s not a “foreign concept” for companies focused on improving multinational revenue profiles. The significance of consistent and contextual content was front and center for this audience, as it should be.

With so much of our news focused on the Boston conference the last couple of weeks, you might have missed the publication of a new case study and a new white paper. Both are by Senior Analyst Leonor Ciarlone, and as usual, both are free. The case study is “The Global Customer Experience: Sun Microsystems’ Vision for the Participation Age”, and is the topic of today’s webinar. The white paper is “Eliminating the Fear Factor: Creating a Culture of Compliance“, and a recording of the webinar covering this is available here.

It has been interesting to note that even inside the US, more and more languages start appearing in various services. Spanish is the obvious example, but at the Gilbane Boston conference we heard that e.g. a New England healthcare provider needs to think about providing information in Vietnamese and in Russian. The old saying “You can always buy in your own language, but you must sell in your customer’s language” still holds true.

Although English has become the universal second language, people still feel more comfortable dealing in their own native language. Maybe the next generation will be different (although I guess that has always been the expectation of the previous generation) and will communicate mainly with smileys – but I believe that languages will not go away.

One could assume that in the European Union with its plethora of official languages there would be a lot of language tools available. Well, there is e.g. Eurodicautom, a multilingual and searchable term bank which includes about 5.5 million entries in 48 subject fields. It continues to be available, but it is currently not updated, as it is being moved into a new database – and the latest news about it are from 2003. So one can only hope that the migration will be completed soon and the updating can continue, as new words appear in languages continuously. Just think about “truthiness”, which was chosen as Merriam-Webster’s word of the year in 2006.

There are several other multilingual general and industry-specific dictionaries available in the web, such as the European multilingual environmental glossary at http://glossary.eea.europa.eu/EEAGlossary/. Another example is the Microsoft multilingual terminology at http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/MILSGlossary.mspx. Googling e.g. with “multilingual glossaries” or “multilingual dictionaries” brings a lot of hits to various resources.

The thing is, multilingual content management and multilingual searches start from good multilingual terminology. There will be a lot of work needed in that area, both in general and in industry- or even in company-specific dictionaries. I will follow up on this topic later.

For Immediate Release:

LISA Forum and CM Pros to Co-Locate with 2007 Gilbane Conferences on Content Management Technologies
12/11/06

Gilbane Conferences Considered Premiere Industry Events for Obtaining Content Management Advice 

Contacts:
Welz & Weisel Communications
Evan Weisel, 703-218-3555
Cell: 703-628-5754
evan@w2comm.com
Jeffrey V. Arcuri
Lighthouse Seminars
508-759-8180
jeff@lighthouseseminars.com

Boston MA, December 11, 2006. The Gilbane Group and Lighthouse Seminars today announced that the Gilbane Conference series is extending its reach into complementary technologies in 2007 with the co-location of both the LISA Forum and the CM Pros Summit. Having established itself as the industry’s top forum for bringing together industry experts, vendors and end users to share new content management technologies and real-world experiences, the addition of these new events to the Gilbane Conferences will help further educate attendees and drive business success.

LISA (Localization Industry Standards Association) is one of the leading international associations for globalization professionals and organizations doing business around the world. It has distilled the right ways and wrong ways of supporting international customers, products and services over the last fifteen years from more than 500 corporate members, public & private institutions, government ministries and trade organizations. CM Pros (Content Management Professionals Association) is the worldwide organization for people who want to learn more about content management from other CM professionals.

“Our partnership with Gilbane illustrates the structural link between globalization services and managing content globally,” said Michael Anobile, Managing Director of LISA. “Users of globalization tools, technologies and standards now have a single point of reference for the expertise required to develop, sell and support products, customers and information services worldwide.”

In its three years since inception, the Gilbane Conferences (Boston, Washington DC and San Francisco) have rapidly gained a reputation for being the premiere content management events to attend due to the focus of providing neutral and educational information to attendees. The events will offer attendees a chance to learn about Web content management, enterprise content management, collaboration, enterprise wikis & blogs, globalization & localization, enterprise search & search based applications, enterprise digital rights management, and automated publishing.

“Because we are strictly neutral with regard to vendors, analysts, enterprises, and consultants, we have been able to maintain a constant dialog with each group, all of whom are our customers, and all of whom we have learned from,” said Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair. “Our conference content is carefully designed by our team of consultants and analysts to ensure the focus is on what you need to know to successfully plan and implement content technology solutions. Partnering with LISA and CM Pros only increases the value we offer attendees in providing actionable information that attendees can implement immediately.”

For more information on the 2007 Gilbane Conferences, visit:

• http://gilbanesf.com/
• http://gilbanedc.com/
• http://gilbaneboston.com/

About Gilbane Group, Inc.
The Gilbane Group, Inc. serves the content technology community with publications, conferences and consulting services. The Gilbane Group, Inc. also administers the Content Technology Works program disseminating best practices with partners Software AG (TECdax:SOW), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW), Artesia Digital Media, a Division of Open Text, Astoria Software, ClearStory Systems (OTCBB:INSS), Context Media (Oracle, NASDAQ:ORCL), Convera (NASDAQ:CNVR), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Idiom, Mark Logic, omtool (NASDAQ:OMTL), Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ:OTEX), SDL International (London Stock Exchange:SDL), Vasont Systems, Vignette (NASDAQ:VGN), and WebSideStory (NASDAQ:WSSI). https://gilbane.com

About Lighthouse Seminars
Lighthouse Seminars’ events cover information technologies and “content technologies” in particular. These include content management of all types, digital asset management, document management, web content management, enterprise portals, enterprise search, web and multi-channel publishing, electronic forms, authoring, content and information integration, information architecture, and e-catalogs. http://www.lighthouseseminars.com

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Underscoring the increasing interest in globalization and localization among our audience of content and web professionals are three items this week. Today we announced that the the LISA (Localization Industry Standards Association) Forum will co-locate with the Gilbane conferences starting with Gilbane San Francisco April 10- 12, 2007. Last Friday, Kaija Poysti, introduced herself as our new guest blogger covering translation and localization issues (in her post, she doesn’t actually propose it, but she does point us to some reasons why we should just all speak Finnish). And, this coming Wednesday, we co-host a case-study webinar on how Sun has built a a global customer experience with their online content and branding.

I am starting to blog here on mainly globalization and localization, and the many issues they bring to end users and organizations. To give you an idea about what my views and thoughts are based on, here is a short background:

As a native Finnish speaker I realized early on why languages do matter – very few people outside Finland speak any Finnish, despite its many quaint characteristics, such as 16 cases formed by adding endings to nouns. In addition, I studied operations research and systems analysis at the Helsinki University of Technology, which gave me a tendency to look at everything as processes which can be optimized.

For 14 years, I had a localization service company, Trantex, which translated a lot of software and documentation for major sw providers, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, etc., and also did technical writing and training. In 1997 we sold the company to L&H and I moved to Boston, where I later became a consultant to Finnish high-tech companies entering the US market.

After all the years I spent in the localization world, I have kept following the industry, as I think there are very interesting developments and challenges ahead. In 1985 a translation customer told me that I should start looking for a new job, as all computer users will want to use only English software. Since then, the number of languages into which companies have to translate their materials has at least tripled. With the web and now with wikis and blogs, information can be published instantly 24/7 all over the world, and much of it is or needs to be in languages other than English. After all, only 5% of the world’s population are native English speakers (354 million according to Wikipedia).

I welcome comments and discussion – though preferably in English :0).