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: A holistic focus on the People, Processes, and Technology that create, translate, manage, distribute, and consume global content.

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.