Category: Content management & strategy (Page 188 of 483)

I really liked this term I saw at TAUS, the Translation Automation User Society http://www.translationautomation.com/index.php. Putting the emphasis on the word “useful” is what discussions on machine translation (MT) has needed.

OK, we all know examples of MT shortcomings. My very old favourite is the MT system which translated the biblical sentence “The flesh is weak but the spirit lasts” into Russian as “The steak is rotten but the vodka is good” on the days before Glasnost. Machine translation is not perfect – but it can be very, very useful. Allowing me to understand what a Chinese web site is about without knowing a single character of Chinese is very useful indeed, especially when I am doing market research on China.

The fact is, there is not enough time – and definitely not enough money – to do human translation on even a fraction of the information that is being produced. So, if MT helps people to become aware of your message, it certainly should be considered as a tool, even if the result is not perfect. Useful is often enough.

Besides, there are quite a lot of MT systems available, both free and commercial ones, more than many might imagine. Several of them already do a good job on a specific topic, and can be improved further with special terminology. The Translation Guide at lists over 520 links to MT systems in 56 languages – sadly, the page has last been updated in 2003. Wikipedia offers a shorter, but more current list at . And for one great resource on MT issues, see Jeff Allen’s site at .

February 1, 2007, 1:00 pm ET
Take Your Customer Experience to the Next Level, Part 2: Small Changes for Big Impact
Sponsored by FatWire
Topics to be covered include highlights of a web-based survey on current state of practice, the growing importance of relevancy as a business asset, obstacles to building expertise in relevancy, and recommendations for moving toward better online experiences today.
Speakers are Jeff Ernst, VP Marketing, FatWire, and Pradeep Aradyha, VP/Architect, Digitas, a leader in designing, building, and running large-scale marketing engines for worldwide businesses. I do the honors as moderator.
Register for the webinar.

Bluespring Software announced the general availability of BPM Suite 4.5. Technical highlights include Microsoft Office 2007 integration, WSS 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 integration, PDF Form support, and SQL reporting services adoption. Expanded Microsoft integrations enable users to dynamically create Excel 2007 files, Word 2007 documents and InfoPath 2007 forms with any data moving throughout the process, including reading from Excel, Word, InfoPath, Adobe PDF files, ODBC-compliant databases and Web Services. In addition, Bluespring Web Parts enable users to embed work list management, process monitoring and reporting inside SharePoint pages as well as trigger processes off of SharePoint events and actions on any SharePoint entity. The release also expands the product’s “in-flight” Process Editing capability, delivering process agility by allowing users to edit or change “in-flight” processes resulting from unexpected business cases without requiring code changes, server restarts or needing to wait for all “in-flight” processes to complete. Bluespring’s BPM Suite is 1 of 2 Microsoft Gold Partners whose software products are being featured in the Microsoft Office 2007 launch kit, provided to attendees at 75 North America launch events.

In December 2006, I conducted a mini survey of content management professionals to find out what they have experienced as the biggest challenges when implementing a CMS. I found the results to be pretty interesting and worthwhile sharing with the CM community at large.

To view the survey results, you can download the PDF from my site at www.ziacontent.com/cmfocus.htm. Also checkout my related article on the CMS-Wire site titled “Things that Go Bump in Your CMS Project.”