Category: Content management & strategy (Page 174 of 481)

I have said this many times before, and will say again: the world is multilingual, and more and more people are working daily in a multilingual environment. In companies, this multilingual environment is not only about translation, but about working with customers and colleagues whose native language is different from one’s own. That can lead to a lot of miscommunication, and I think that nobody has even started to measure the real costs or missed sales arising from it.

Communication starts with terminology, and that is where I see a lot of needs (and opportunities) for new solutions. Corporate terminology – “that which we call a widget by any other name goes in other companies” – is something that I think benefits from active input from corporate experts. Wikis seem an interesting way to enhance corporate communication, so I emailed with Greg Lloyd, CEO of Traction Software to ask whether he has seen wikis used for handling multilingual issues. He can be reached at grl@tractionsoftware.com.

Traction Software has been in the corporate blog/wiki business since July 2002, and has 250+ corporate customers. According to Greg, Traction’s TeamPage is best described in terms of Doug Engelbart’s NLS/Augment model, re-imagined for the Web (more at Traction Roots | Doug Engelbart.

KP: Do your customers use wikis to handle multilingual issues, such as terminology?
GL: We have an international pharma customer who wanted to provide an interactive online glossary of terms that have specialized meanings. For example, in writing a new drug application, many terms have specialized meanings and interpretations dictated by regulatory authorities in the U.S., Europe and other regions.
At this customer, glossary definitions are usually written by people with specialized experience in new drug applications and similar filings, but the glossaries are intended for working reference by everyone in the company – not limited to those who deliver translations. The company has offices around the world, but most working communication is in English or French. A majority of employees have very good reading knowledge of both languages, but aren’t necessarily aware of some specialized meanings and interpretations – including those which change as new regulations are issued.

We developed a “Glossary skin” to address this need. The Glossary skin is a Traction “skin” or UI presentation layer that in this case, provides a specialized and simplified Glossary view of the underling blog/wiki data stored in the TeamPage Journal. It gives the users versatile tools for handling terminology, such as looking up glossary terms, term definitions, guidance on how to use the term, and the possibility to comment a term or ask questions about it. All terms are in both English and French. Changes and additions can be tracked with standard blog/wiki features, and the users can also subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds on updates. These are just a few of the functionalities of the solution.

KP: Do the wiki glossaries integrate with other glossaries or localization tools, such as translation memories?
GL: For the Glossary Wiki there are no special translator tools built in. I believe that general purpose translation tools will likely best be loosely-coupled mashup style. I haven’t seen requests for industry specific glossaries from customers, but I think there may be a business opportunity.

KP: What kind of feedback have you received from your customer? Have there been requests for special functionalities?
GL: The pharma customer is very happy with the result, which is used company-wide. We’ve also demonstrated the Glossary skin to customers in Japan and other countries. Several have expressed interest and are piloting use of the Glossary skin, primarily for developing and delivering specialized glossaries for internal working communication as well as translating deliverables.

The ability for global enterprises to create interactive Glossaries for working communication among employees, suppliers and other stakeholders seems to be getting the most interest. Many global companies use English as a standard for internal communication, but the ability to add comments or questions in other languages is a big plus. The ability to create and delivery interactive Web glossaries in Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. as well as European and other Asian languages is also very useful.

Traction uses UTF-8 Unicode to store, search and deliver content written in any combination of European and Asian alphabets in any blog/wiki space (or in the same page), so a multi-lingual global glossary is easy to deliver and can be simple to author using the standard Web browser interface.

KP: What have been the biggest advantages your customers have received from using a wiki to create a glossary, instead of using a specialized terminology management tool?
GL: The biggest advantages are: 1) Simple access using a Web browser, particularly when the wiki has specialized skin to make the Glossary application work with no training; 2) Simple group editing and history using the the wiki edit model; 3) Simple integration of comments and feedback; 4) Simple, scalable and secure deployment corporate-wide.

KP: Corporate wikis seem to be an interesting way to share information and expertise. Do you see them also being used for translation work?
GL: Yes, I can certainly see how the Glossary skin could be extended to support other wiki per-page translation models. At present the Glossary skin implementation is available to TeamPage customers as a Traction Skin Definition Language (SDL) plug-in. We’ll be packaging it along with its SDL source code as a free plug-in example later this summer. We’ll work with customers and partners to determine how to best provide translation wiki’s powered by Traction TeamPage.

Google has added Sun’s StarOffice to its free Google Pack. This has been expected and is of course targeting Microsoft’s Office suite. Richard MacManus reported it Sunday, and Dan Farber says most of what I would say about it.

This is just a quick reminder to our Analyst on Demand subscribers that the results of our survey on the usability of commercially available content management solutions will be available in early September. The data will come directly from the feedback of the solution providers’ customers. Vendors covered will include Interwoven, Tridion, Vignette, FatWire, Percussion, RedDot, EMC/Documentum, CrownPeak, Mediasurface, PaperThin, Oracle, Day, Hot Banana, Clickability, Acumium, and others.

In recent conversations with several of Gilbane’s Analyst On Demand and Technology Acquisition Advisory clients, I have observed two careless practices that have prevented enterprises from being able to assess both the feature-functionality of their existing WCM applications and their requirements for selecting solutions to replace those applications. Both relate to a lack of documentation.
In the first case, it’s the absence of a master list of the WCM-related applications that have been developed in-house over the years. One company has “about 50” such applications, and geographically-dispersed individuals throughout the enterprise can tell me what some of them are, but no one can refer me to anyone or any system that has the complete listing. Discrete ongoing development projects exist for many of these applications, a few of which live buried deep in departmental silos. Needless to say, the functionality of applications within these silos is known only to a few people, is never re-used in other initiatives, and in fact often gets duplicated by newer siloed projects.
The second shortcoming is the non-documentation of feature-functions within the applications themselves. Even when applications are well known throughout the organization, their complete functionality sets are known to no one. This results in duplicate development, redundant purchases, and negative ROI — although no one knows just how negative.
At a minimum, enterprises should maintain master lists of both their WCM-related applications and the functionality within each one. To make effective use of such documentation, companies should establish effective dissemination processes. Examples range from the inclusion of key individuals in change control board meetings (for companies with predictive-style development methods) to informal cross-functional communication, especially between disparate technology groups, but also between IT and the business units whose requirements drive application development.

In a global economy, corporate employees increasingly need to communicate in foreign languages, whether in sales, internal meetings, customer support etc. I spoke with Janne Nevasuo, CEO of AAC Global, one of the relatively few localization and translation companies which also offers language, culture and communications skills training. A year ago it was acquired by Sanoma-WSOY, a major stock-listed European media corporation with operations in over 20 countries.

KP: How long have you been in the language training business?
JN: We started with language training already 38 years ago, so we have a very long experience. We offer language training services only to corporate customers, and currently train about 20,000 people every year. For the past 20 years, our language training business has been growing about 15% annually.

KP: So you started with training, and moved to translation later?
JN: Yes, we added translation and localization services, as our corporate training customers started to ask for help in translations. As we have always focused only on corporate customers, it was a very natural growth path for us, helping our customers to handle all their multilingual needs.

KP: What are the main languages you give training for?
JN: English is by far the biggest language, and has been that for practically all the time we have been in business. About 70% of our training is on corporate English, as English is the “universal second language” in business. Demand for Russian is growing continuously.

KP: That is interesting, as so many people now speak English and learn it at school!
JN: That is just the point: school English is not enough for corporate use. Companies need to get their message through to their customers, employees, and partners in several different situations: presentations, meetings, negotiations etc. One can only imagine both the direct and indirect losses accruing from miscommunications and misunderstandings, when people cannot communicate efficiently in English.

KP: So which do you see as the biggest trends in language training?
JN: First of all, corporate language training is actually “substance training”, i.e. training employees about the company’s product or service in a foreign language, and about handling different situations, such as negotiations or presentations, in a foreign language. So corporate language training is rather far removed from language learning at schools; we focus on the substance, key terminology and message.

Another important trend is that language training needs to become part of everyday work and daily processes. The learning should happen without the student actually realizing that he or she is learning, and it should happen during the actual work, using actual materials and doing actual tasks. Nobody has time to go to even a one-day separate course.

New technologies are brining us more efficient solutions for this, such as the extensive terminology tools AAC Global offers. I would like to point out, though, that this does not mean only teach-yourself language learning, as it does not work for everybody. Innovative solutions combining self-paced and tutored learning are needed.

KP: Is language training bought only by big companies?
JN: Certainly not. Companies of all sizes need to communicate in foreign languages, so we serve companies from small to huge global companies. A very important thing to understand is this: nowadays more and more employees in a company need to communicate in a foreign language, regardless of their task. 10 years ago there were a few designated people in the company, typically in the export department, who needed to speak another language. Now practically everyone needs a foreign language, whether in sales, support, business intelligence, marketing… and also when communicating with the company’s own people and partners in other countries.

According to research we have done, people spend up to 1 hour per day looking for the right term or doing a translation. There is thus a lot of room for efficiencies in daily work processes to help people become more multilingual. Actually in large corporations, language training is also part of their HR process, so that the HR department participates in getting just the right kind of language training to each employee.

KP: In previous blog entries, Leonor and Mary talked about the emerging markets. How do you see them?
JN: We have worked especially with Russia and the former Eastern bloc countries. The need for training corporate English is enormous there; typically the companies there have a few people who are fluent in corporate English, but then there is a large gap. Many young people have studied English at school, but still need training in corporate practices and terminologies. Still, these are the same needs as in all other countries.