Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals
When we launched this blog in January, we had high hopes for creating an interactive community that encourages participation. We still do. Since interactivity breeds interactivity…
Welcome to our inaugural “Poll of the Week.” This week’s topic? Globalization and brand management.
4 questions,
30 seconds,
Promise.
As the Internet continues to redefine ubiquitous, the issue of cross language search becomes more critical. It’s a pervasive challenge with extreme scalability requirements. Hard to imagine, but the Internet will be full by about 2010 according to the American Registry for Internet Numbers. ARIN’s recommendation for IPv6 demonstrates the potential breadth of information overload.
Organizations such as the European-based Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) have moved beyond discussion and into in-depth testing on cross-language search for many years. With its “Leaping over Language Barriers” announcement, Google has moved beyond experimentation and toward productization of its cross-language search feature.
IMO, any discussion of what the interconnected world “looks like” in the future, whether focused on fill in your label here 2.0, social networking, customer experience, global elearning, etc., (should) eventually drill-down to translation and localization issues. Once we’re at that level of conversation, there’s more challenges to discuss — the ongoing evolution of automated translation, the balance between human and machine translation, the conundrum of rich media and image translation, and as Kaija will always remind us, the quality and context of search results as opposed to merely the quantity.
As a researcher, I’ve used Google’s “translate this” functionality and Yahoo’s Babel Fish (originally AltaVista’s) numerous times to “get the gist” of a non-English article. But my reliance on the results has been more for sanity-checking trends than for factual data gathering. Inconsistencies skew the truth. I just can’t trust it. Can we trust this? Time will tell. Is it a step in the right direction for the masses? No doubt.
Bill has a nice summary of SDL’s research into the use of XML in delivering global content across multiple channels. Seven golden rules is right on target — given the age-old premise from cognitive psychologist George A. Miller.
Check it out.
One of the unique aspects of the translation and localization industries is the breadth of contributors and skill sets that actually get the work done. I remember standing in line last summer for the ferry to Ellis Island and marveling at the number of languages being spoken simultaneously and the number of cultures represented in one huge line. But for that moment, (2 hours actually) that line was a community with a single purpose. Despite language barriers, everyone shared the excitement of the historical adventure to come.
No, the San Diego-based WorldSummit organized by Idiom Technologies didn’t offer a cross-country trek to the Status of Liberty. It did however, offer an opportunity for an impressive group of professionals with multiple skill sets and cultural backgrounds to come together and share the excitement of where the industry is heading and what it can achieve along the way.
Blending technical writers, brand managers, and marketers from varied organizations with translators from multiple countries, LSPs, university professors, industry researchers, and analysts is no small feat. But for that moment, (3 days actually) WorldSummit fostered community and conversation amongst those who research, those who groom the next generation of translators, those determined to author source content with globalization in mind, those faced with the nuances of dialect and locale, and those who provide the services and technologies so necessary for this complex work.
With Mary and I both attending, we got to compare notes and reactions as we moved through various user sessions, informal conversations, and social events. One clear pattern we both noticed is the power of human connection; IOW, the power of face-to-face, passionate conversations. Without belittling the impact of Web communities, I am standing firm on the notion that there’s nothing like eye contact, body language and the sight of folks waving their hands to speak to fuel the adrenaline of a community conversation. It’s positively contagious. Here’s some examples of the adrenaline I’m talking about:
Whew. Documenting the varied participants and choosing my highlights was tough enough. Pulling off the event was surely another story. Kudos to the Idiom team for achieving a well-rounded and extremely organized event.
The integration of content and translation management workflows has a great deal of value for globalization projects. And as we’ve discussed, there are various market approaches to streamlining these increasingly complex processes. With the announcement of SDL International’s intended acquisition of Tridion (set to close by end of May,) buyers officially have an additional approach — translation and Web content management under one roof.
In this case, the opportunity is clearly for marketers who struggle to meet growing corporate and consumer demand for a multi-site, multi-lingual Web presence that drives revenue and protects brand (for the former) and delivers localized customer experiences (for the latter.) The time is right for this marriage, as globalization continues to climb toward the top of the CIO’s “must-have” strategy list.
SDL and Tridion are undoubtedly headed toward a cohesive integration of their respective TMS and Web CMS technologies, which makes a great deal of sense for those organizations wishing to standardize on one platform for Web site translation and management. As we would expect, API-level workflow integration is at the top of the priority list, according to executives from both companies. There’s quite a bit of potential for more, when one considers the ability of SDL’s Author Assistant to enhance the value of content at its source, i.e. during content creation, as well as the power of Tridion’s Communications Statistics module to drive process improvements based on data culled from user activities. Safe to say it will be interesting to watch the evolution of this combined product line for its impact on the Web content lifecycle.
As we’ve seen in the ECM and BPM suite market, the trend toward vendor consolidation changes the landscape dramatically and spurs the inevitable “suite versus best-of breed” debate. Within the globalization market, we expect this acquisition to follow suit — after all, the marriage crosses the “dotted line” by solidifying the value of content and translation management integration.
At the end of the day however, the buyer defines the purchasing decision that makes the most sense, based on the most pressing — or painful — business requirements. As it stands now, Tridion will be a separate division within SDL and operate autonomously. R5 will be sold as a module within the SDL product set and renamed SDL Tridion R5. In parallel, SDL TMS will be sold as a Tridion module.
In effect, this strategy leaves decision-making in the hands of the buyer, as it should be. Hence, the immediate goal for this marriage is to demonstrate just how compelling the promise of a “total solution” will be. The CMPros community is already weighing in on the potential; Gilbane readers: join the conversation! We’d like to continue this discussion with your feedback.
This was one of my favorite quotes from Sun’s April 10th presentation at Gilbane San Francisco, titled Managing Content Globally: What Works, What Doesn’t. Given by Jed Michnowicz, Engineering Lead, and Youngmin Radochonski, Globalization Program Manager, the presentation opened the LISA Forum on Day 1 of the conference.
Jed and Youngmin nailed it when they defined three key components of a global content platform: content management, translation, and delivery. As they outlined the struggles of legacy challenges in all three areas, a pattern of checklist items for the audience quickly surfaced. Lack of metadata. “Siloed” mindsets, workflow, and content repositories. Static Web server content delivery. Inconsistent messaging. Slow time to market. Cost overruns. As moderator, it is always interesting to scan the faces in the crowd for reactions. During this part of the presentation the response was palpable: “got that, got that, and yes, definitely got that.”
They also nailed it when they moved to the “here’s the good news” part of the presentation. Global awareness throughout the organization. Process alignment and consistency. Separation of content from presentation. Translation memory management and sharing. Integrated content and translation workflows. Automated, Web services-based content distribution. They described what is most definitely a “Level 2+” integration from a technology perspective. At this point, the audience response was equally palpable: “want that, want that, and yes, definitely want that.”
Wrapping up the success story with lessons learned (according to people, process, and technology categories; be still my heart!) Jed and Youngmin also noted that Sun, like most organizations, is still learning. Some of the questions they posed — which we will continue to explore on this blog — included:
On behalf of The Gilbane Group and LISA, we thank these excellent presenters for a job well done. This presentation will be available here this week; check out one of my other favorite quotes emblazoned on the t-shirt on the last slide.
The recording from our February 14th webinar, “Integrating Translation and Content Management Workflows” is now available here. Many thanks to Steve Billings, Senior Solutions Engineer with Idiom Technologies, and David Smith, President of LinguaLinx, for joining me for the conversation and of course, to the participants for attending.
We informally polled participants during our last webinar on globalization business drivers and published the results here. In this webinar, we asked the question again. Here’s the results:
We also added a new poll specific to integrating translation and content workflows. Here’s the results:
Clearly the subject of this webinar was right on for participants, with 21% citing “integration of CMS (content management systems) and GMS (globalization management systems) as the number #1 headache. The good news is that there are a number of market approaches to cohesive workflow integration for translation processes. We’ve provided details on our definitions of Levels 1-3 here. Steve and David presented a typical customer scenario involving all three integration levels during the webinar. Check it out.
If so…
The LISA Forum Asia in Beijing on March 12-15 will focus on buyers/end-users of globalization services. Entitled “The Globalization of China 2.0,” the program features some of China’s international expansion leaders alongside high-tech multinationals such as Microsoft, Huawei, Cisco Systems, Nokia, Adobe Systems, TIBCO Software and IBM.
The program includes sessions such as “The Basics of Going Global: Understanding Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation,” “Buying and Implementing Content Management and Global Translation Management Systems,” and “How to Run a Globalization Audit of Your Business Processes.” Register here.
For those of you not going to Beijing, note that the LISA Forum’s highly-popular globalization audit session will also run at Gilbane San Francisco on Tuesday April 10th during pre-conference tutorials.
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