Author: Leonor Ciarlone (Page 3 of 13)

Webinar Recording Available: Translation-oriented Authoring

April 24, 2008 / Leonor Ciarlone / 0 Comments

Our April 16th webinar on translation-oriented authoring hosted by across Systems was an excellent 360 degree view of its value from a consultancy, language service provider, and end-user perspective. Thanks to Richard Sikes from LocFlowTech, Inc., Peter Argondizzo from Argo Translation, Inc., and Amy Karls from QuadTech for and a job well done! Access the recording here.

As Sikes noted in his opening remarks, decisions that get made in one part of an organization often show up as costs in another area. This is particularly true of translation and localization costs. Those who create and translate product content (user guides, operator manuals, quick start guides, online help, and the list goes on…) understand the downstream effect of decisions made under pressure all too well.

According to Karls, demand for multilingual product support content consistently is increasing, but timelines and resources are most assuredly not. Isolated story? We think not. Check out the webinar poll on the number of language outputs required from our audience, largely technical documentation folks.

Now check out the range of tools our audience is using to create product support content.

I believe there is not a single technical writer who intends to create inconsistencies or confusion for their translator counterparts. But stuff happens. Like “hurry up” pressure. Like “we lost our editor” pressure. Like “who’s got the latest version of the Style Guide pressure.”

According to Argondizzo, translation-oriented authoring has numerous advantages, among them:

Unlocks never before utilized value of translation memory database for writers
Strengthens partnership with language service provider and writers
Provides content creators with a different perspective of translation memory usage
Easy to understand and track savings
Time saved by author not rewriting text
Consistency for additional reuse in other channels
Regulatory concerns in rewriting text that already exists

I wholeheartedly agree. Check out the webinar recording. The advantages of “assistance” is demonstrable and impressive, whether one calls it authoring assistance, translation-oriented authoring, or controlled authoring.

Multilingual Social Computing: Questioning the Wisdom of the Crowds

April 23, 2008 / Leonor Ciarlone / 0 Comments

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.

Resources & Opportunity: W3C’s ITS Interest Group

April 18, 2008 / Leonor Ciarlone / 0 Comments

Cross-post from the Globalization blog.
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.

Free Globalization Intelligence: Unicode’s CLDR Project

April 13, 2008 / Leonor Ciarlone / 2 Comments

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Arle Lommel, LISA OSCAR Standards Chair, to discuss the importance of Unicode’s Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) project, which collects and provides data such as date/time formats, numeric formatting, translated language and country names, and time zone information that is needed to support globalization.

LC: What is the CLDR?
AL: The Common Locale Data Repository is a volunteer-developed and maintained resource coordinated and administered by the Unicode Consortium that is available for free. Its goal is to gather basic linguistic information for various “locales,” essentially combinations of a language and a location, like French in Switzerland.
LC: What does the resource encompass?
AL: CLDR gathers things like lists of language and country names, date formats, time zone names, and so forth. This is critical knowledge to know when developing projects for the markets represented by specific locales. By drilling down past the language level to look at the market level, CLDR data is designed to be relevant for a specific area of the world. Think of the difference between U.S. and British English, for example. You would clearly have a problem if British spellings were used in a U.S. project or prices appeared like “£10.54” instead of “$10.54.” Problems like these are very common when product developers don’t think through what the implications of their design decisions will be.
LC: What other issues does CLDR address?
AL: Other problems addressed by CLDR include the numeric form of dates, where something like “04.05.06” could mean “April 5, 2006,” “May 4, 2006,” or even “May 6, 2004,” depending on where you live. Clearly you have to know what people expect.
LC: What is the advantage of using CLDR?
AL: It makes resources available to anyone, at no cost. Without something like the CLDR, one would need to investigate all of market issues, pay to translate things like country names into each language, and so forth. Activities such as this can add significantly to the cost of a project. The CLDR provides them for free and provides the critical advantage of consistency.
LC: Why should content creators care about the CLDR?
AL: At LISA we have heard time and again that not taking international issues into consideration from a project’s earliest phases doubles the cost of a project and makes it take twice as long. While many issues relate to decisions made by programmers, some of the issues do relate to the job of technical authors and other content creators. While it’s unlikely that a technical writer will need to use a CLDR list of language names in Finnish directly, for instance, the content creator might design an online form in which a user fills out what language he or she would like to be contacted in. If there is insufficient room to display the language name because it is longer in Finnish (a common problem when going from English to Finnish), the end user may have difficulty, something that could have been prevented by the content author if he or she had been given the resources to test the design early on. The CLDR makes the information available that allows authors to prevent basic problems that create issues for users around the world.
LC: How can professionals contribute to the CLDR?
AL: Right now the biggest need of the CLDR is for native (or very good) speakers of non-English languages to (1) supply missing data, and (2) verify that existing data points are correct. Because the CLDR is volunteer driven, people of all levels of competence and ability are able to contribute as much or as little as they want. Unicode welcomes this participation. The real need is for people to know about and use the CLDR. In my experience even the savviest of developers often don’t know about the CLDR and what it contains, so they spend time and money on recreating a resource that they could have for free.
LC: How is LISA supporting CLDR?
AL: We are committed to supporting Unicode and the CLDR, so we have launched an initiative where people who sign up with LISA to contribute to the CLDR and who spend ten or more hours working on the project are eligible to receive individual LISA membership for a year as a token of our appreciation for their contribution. So if any readers have the needed language/locale skills to supply data missing from the CLDR or to review existing data, they can contact me to get started.

Authoring with Globalization in Mind

April 4, 2008 / Leonor Ciarlone / 0 Comments

Attention: technical writers! In the spotlight next week: the availability of authoring assistance technologies that bring a living, breathing corporate Style Guide into content creation environments. Creating team-authored product support content with consistency and globalization in mind has come a long way. More on that over on the Globalization blog.
Join me on April 9th to discuss the value of translation-oriented authoring with technology provider across Systems, language services provider Argo Translation, Inc., globalization consultant Richard Sikes, and QuadGraphics, a customer reaping the benefits of authoring assistance technology in a FrameMaker environment.

UN Bans Unnecessary Languages: Scary but False

April 3, 2008 / Leonor Ciarlone / 0 Comments

April Fool’s Day usually brings out the kid in all of us, making for some fun and interesting spoofs. The April 1st press release that the United Nations was banning all “unnecessary languages” brought out the worried adult in me pretty quickly. Turns out I was spoofed — thankfully.

OTOH, the arrogance inherent to “all will be English” begs the question, are many organizations being spoofed on a daily basis by succumbing to this theory? And is it not scarily interesting that reading the entire article as a source of truth doesn’t sound too far off given the lack of global content — not only translated, but localized — in numerous industries? PRWeb claimed the article “too close for comfort,” but valuable for revealing serious issues in the global community.

Posted by EnglishClub.com, the article stated, “By 2049, when all languages other than English will have been phased out, the only language that will have international sanction will be English.” Pretty ominous sounding stuff. Enough to generate 315 extremely emotional responses to the blog entry between March 31 and April 3rd. Scary but false.

As the United Nations continues to promote 2008 as the Year of International Languages, here’s a “scary but true.”

On Global Brand Management: An Interview with Translation.com’s Candy Moss

March 31, 2008 / Leonor Ciarlone / 0 Comments

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Candy Moss, Creative Director with Translations.com, to discuss the importance of multilingual global brand management as a success criterion for global organizations.

LC: What role does a creative team play within Translations.com?
CM: Our Creative Team operates as a resource to our corporate clients’ marketing and advertising teams. Our Multicultural Marketing Department provides cross-cultural branding research, copy transcreation, and image consulting services as part of Translations.com’s core service offering.
LC: What is your background?
CM: 20 years in multicultural marketing consulting, with a background in content and creative design; my experience at Translations.com has increased my expertise in Hispanic markets in the U.S. as well as global markets considerably.
LC: How large is the Creative Team and what kinds of tasks are they involved with?
CM: We have close to 20 full time staff across multiple, global production centers. We also contract copy writers, graphic designers, and linguists. Our tasks include researching the impact of brand names, package design, website layout and content; any elements that impact of the global products nuances such as tone, style, design, content, format, color and illustrations.
LC: So that means your team does both transadaptation and transcreation work, correct? For global branding projects, which skill set is needed most?
CM: Both are important. However, adapting marketing messages has more to do preserving the concept (of the message) and changing the execution than with word for word translations. The example on “The Lighter Side” of our Web site demonstrates the challenge of dealing with the intricacies of culture.
LC: What kinds of research does the creative team rely on?
CM: We have extensive qualitative data based on 10 years of proprietary research. We develop customized survey tools based on each client’s needs. Once we get feedback from the target market, we work closely with the client’s creative team. This is also essential because they are the subject matter experts in their company’s product, positioning goals, and target customers. Generally, we function as an extension of a company’s brand champion team: the advertising agency is, in my experience, the group that is the first to recognize the need for our services. In the end, we team up with the agency and the company’s internal staff, serving as a general resource to the group.
LC: What are some of the best practices you have seen in global branding efforts?
CM: Understanding the need for due diligence in obtaining, understanding, and incorporating the voice of the local customer. And then, having the skills to distinguish between individual opinions and reactions to those of the larger culture. Overall? Understand your goals: why are you making these localization efforts and how effectively do they convey your company’s goals.
LC: And the worst?
CM: The idea that one person can assume what a culture will or will not bear. You really have to be open minded so that you are receptive to what impact a phrase or image will have in each cultural setting. A single line of copy or image can have a lasting impact — you want to do everything you can to be sure that impact is positive. Even after 20 years in the industry, and evaluating more survey responses than I can count, I learn something new every day.
LC: What is your advice for those striving to communicate the importance of the local in globalization?
CM: Ask your team to put themselves in the target market’s shoes. If that market receives only x percentage of localized content, the perception may be that they are only as important as the effort put into communicating with them. In terms of marketing and global branding efforts, think of the effort put into the taglines or slogans in the source language, usually English. When adapting the message to a different culture, give the effort the same level of respect.

Quality at the Source: Achieving Efficiency and Consistency with Translation-Oriented Authoring

March 12, 2008 / Leonor Ciarlone / 0 Comments

Consistency and quality are always the goals with product support content such as technical documentation. Shorter product development cycles that result from growing business demands add to the pressure, often thwarting a documentation team’s best efforts. In this global economy, pressure is further heightened by the need to add multiple language outputs to a growing list of multi-channel deliverables.

When documentation creation gets pushed to the end the product lifecycle, with translation following “somewhere” behind it, the risk of mistakes and customer dissatisfaction is high. In fact, inconsistency within source documentation leads to numerous downstream issues and costs in translation. The impact can’t be underestimated as multilingual product documentation becomes more and more critical in international vertical markets.

On April 9, 2008 at 8:00 am PT/11:00 am ET/ 4 pm GMT, the Gilbane Group discusses translation-oriented authoring as a means to stop the “ripple” effects — higher costs, poor quality, and inefficient processes — caused by generating content without considering multilingual delivery requirements. Join us by registering here.