Category: Content management & strategy (Page 166 of 489)

I’m at the RSuite User Conference. Day 1 is a fairly technical walkthrough of the product where different Really Strategies consultants and technical product folks will be doing a “CMS in a Day.” After an architectural overview, they are walking through content ingestion, workflow and action handlers, editing options, customization options, and content delivery. By the end of the day, the idea is to show an end-to-end publishing solution.

Eliot Kimber is demonstrating the workflow engine now. Later today, Norm Walsh will give a keynote. And Lisa Bos, Really Strategies’ CTO, is master of ceremonies for the day. That’s a lot of XML brain power in one day.

Tomorrow morning, I interview Gary Cosimini from Adobe in a kind of “fireside chat” format where we will delve into the evolution of Adobe’s creative tools and how they handle XML as well as some broader questions of how XML best fits into publishing workflows. With the upcoming release of CS4, this will be a great opportunity for the audience to hear straight from the horse’s mouth about Adobe’s direction. It will also help put in context Really Strategies’ recent announcement about their Creative Suite Connector for RSuite.

The announcement of this new book caught my attention for a number of reasons, many obviously due to the state of the financial markets. More attuned to the Globalization practice is that we noted in our Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative report that:

A common observation made during industry discussion of Internet-driven opportunities is that the proliferation of the worldwide web has made the business world “flat.” In other words, companies of all sizes can compete on a level playing field wherein everyone has the same access to technology and information. While our study respondents acknowledge the “flattening world” as Thomas Friedman has described it, they also recognize that different geographies and cultures have varying and distinct expectations. Thus, generalized information access does not equate to generalized information delivery. From this perspective, a flattening world requires far deeper levels of content relevancy, localization, and personalization than ever before. From this perspective, “one size fits all” is hardly the recipe for success in the global economy.

Risking the wrath of Friedman’ites, we contend that as far as multilingual communications are concerned, the world is most definitely not flat. Giving Friedman his due, David Smick contends that as far as global financial markets are concerned, the world is most definitely curved, where one “can’t see over the horizon and sight lines are limited.” Describing globalization as the great paradox of our time, this review quickly convinced me to put it on the “must read” list.

In our Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative report, we noted the fact that machine translation (MT) has long been the target of “don’t let this happen to you” jokes throughout the globalization industry. Unpredictable results and poor quality allowed humor to become the focus of MT discussions, making widespread adoption risky at best.

On the other hand, we also noted that scientists, researchers, and technologists have been determined to unlock MT potential since the 1950’s to solve the same core challenges the industry struggles with today: cost savings, speed, and linguist augmentation. Although the infamous report on Languages and Machines from the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) published in 1966 discussed these challenges in some depth (albeit from a U.S. perspective), it sent a resounding message that “there is no emergency in the field of translation.” Research funding suffered; researcher Margaret King described the impact as effectively “killing machine translation research in the States.”

Borrowing from S.E. Hinton, that was then, this is now. Technology advancements and pure computing power have made machine translation not only viable, but also potentially game-changing. A global economy, the volume and velocity of content required to run a global business, and customer expectations is steadily shifting enterprise postures from “not an option” to “help me understand where MT fits.” Case in point — participants in our study identified MT as one of the top three valuable technologies for the future.

There’s lots of game-changing news for our readers to digest.

• An excellent place to start is with our colleagues at Multilingual Magazine, who dedicated the April-May issue to this very subject. Don Osborn over at the Multidisciplinary Perspectives blog provides an excellent summary, posing the question: “Is there a paradigm shift on machine translation?”
• Language Weaver predicts a potential $67.5 billion market for digital translation, fueled by MT. CEO Mark Tapling explains why.
• SYSTRAN, one of the earliest MT software developers provides research and education here.
• And finally (for today), there’s no way to deny the Google impact — here’s their FAQ about the beta version of Google Translate. TAUS weighs in on the subject here.

Mary and I will be at Localization World Madison to provide practical advice and best practices for making the enterprise business case for multilingual communications investments as part of a Global Content Value Chain. But we’re also looking forward to the session focused on MT potential, issues, and vendor approaches. The full grid is here. Join us!

The Content Management Professionals Association (CM Pros) will once again be holding their annual Fall Summit in conjunction with Gilbane Boston in December. There are details over on our Events blog which I won’t duplicate here, or even better, go right to the source at http://summit.cmprofessionals.org/. If you are a member we hope to see you, and if you are not you can find out about joining on the CM Pros site at http://cmprofessionals.org/