As Mary noted previously, globetrotting has been just one reason for our blogging hiatus. The more interesting interrupter has been the development of “the report,” aka our research and analysis for Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Organizations Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain.
It has been an intense period to say the least, as the result comprises the stories of 40 content and localization/translation management professionals as told to myself and colleague Karl Kadie over 60+ hours. We are indebted to this community of experts for their knowledge sharing and deeply impressed by their dedication to improving processes in their areas of expertise.
It feels right then, to dedicate this first blog on our research results to these passionate and meticulous professionals, trained to understand the power of the word and its effect on content consumers. Way back in 2005, I coined an informal term for folks such as these: the glue people — a rare breed who manage to bridge gaps between various organizational units through education, facilitation, and coordination focused on “the bigger picture.”
In this case, painting that picture requires color mixing that supports corporate global expansion goals without compromising the needs and expectations of multinational customers for multilingual content. Thus the demise of the informal term in favor of one that more aptly describes the efforts of today’s content and localization/translation management professional — enter the operational champion.
Focused squarely on the inherent relationship between successful globalization and multilingual communications, our study’s operational champions are savvy customer advocates and marketeers. They have designed internal educational campaigns with titles such as “Content Matters,” “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Not Just for Energy,” and “Do You Know Who’s Not Reading Your Content?” They have titles such as “Content Management Practice Leader,” “Director, Global Language Services,” and “International Marketing Manager.” They have produced inspiring results:
- “We’ve raised the level of awareness of content value in our organization.”
- “We can build one web template and replicate it 25 times for various regions within in six months.”
- “We can show savings of over $900 per document and reduction of translation time by five days.”
- “We have achieved a 68% reuse rate for our content.”
Impressive indeed — and just a sample of what’s inside the report to help speed results for those working toward similar goals. More to come!
