Main Content
Berlin 2007
Building Global Teams Locally
Outsourcing, European Integration and Globalization
Kempinski Hotel Bristol, Berlin, Germany
22-26 October 2007
Outsourcing is an increasingly integral part of any global strategy. By developing international teams, enterprises are able to cost-effectively leverage the best skills around the world to deliver quality products in less time than ever before. Outsourcing has thus increased the number and economic importance of global teams. It is now common to have teams in China, India, Russia, Brazil, and Vietnam all working together on a project with teams in the heart of Europe. Integrating such teams and leveraging the skills available around the globe challenges developers. As they face the task of internal globalization the strategic importance of external globalization will also become more apparent.
Today the European Union is one of the largest political and economic entities in the world, with around 500 million people and an estimated GDP of US$13.4 trillion. Central Europe and the Baltics play a key role in the region: their highly skilled workers, low costs, and proximity to major markets have combined to make them highly attractive destinations for outsourcing in the >$30 billion/year globalization industry. With their growing prosperity they are also coming to be seen as major consumer markets in their own right that can command increasing levels of globalization investment.
LISA Industry Introduction Session
LISA Executive Committee
This session is designed to familiarize attendees with LISA: its goals, management structure, operating objectives and membership entitlements. The Association’s activities, member participation and expectations will be outlined, followed by a question and answer period aimed at identifying how LISA can be more responsive to its Members, the industry and the European market.
KEYNOTE: Responding to Today’s Global Challenge – Globalization’s Key Business and Political Mandates
Mark Lancaster - CEO, SDL International
Karl-Johan Lönnroth - Director General, European Commission Directorate - General for Translation (DGT)
What does the future hold for globalization services? How will the public and private sectors differ in their solutions to provide increasing levels of service with improved efficiency? Join Lönnroth and Lancaster as they compare mandates, operational challenges and how language technologies are being used in their organizations. Lönnroth and Lancaster will provide a candid assessment of their businesses in terms of cost, value, priorities and the deployment of automated translation technologies. They will discuss the roles that standards play in facilitating and streamlining globalization processes and in the increasing convergence of content creation and localization. The perspectives of these two industry leaders are shaping the way globalization business is being conducted and will affect the future of technology and business practices in this industry. Learn first-hand what they consider to be today’s most compelling globalization challenges and how they are preparing their organizations for continued success.
Scaling for Growth and Organizational Diversity
Philo K. Holland, III - Senior Program Manager, Globalization Services Initiative, T-Systems / Deutsche Telekom AG
Holland will provide perspectives and best practice from leading edge corporation for implementing scalable solutions that can gracefully respond to organizational growth, change and diversity. As the business customer division of Deutsche Telekom AG, T-Systems emerged on the marketplace in 2000 as a fusion of 208 independent corporations located in 24 countries. Through 56,000 people in over 20 countries, it now offers an entire range of integrated information and communication technologies (ICT) from a single source, making it one of the driving forces behind innovation in the industry.
China and Europe: What Does the Expanding Chinese Economy Mean for Europe?
Richard Lin - Managing Director, Celestone Systems International
Lin will focus on the opportunities and challenges presented to the globalization community in Europe by the internationalization of China, along with advice on how Europe can better position itself for success. He will provide an overview of the Chinese market, along with an outlook for the next 5 years. He will discuss opportunities for China as a globalization sourcing base and as a target market, while outlining the challenges, including the “localization of localization vendors.”
e-Auctions: Overview of a Controversial Buying Process
Monique Floch - Vendor Manager, Hewlett-Packard
Christine Gussenhoven - Business Operations Manager, Hewlett-Packard
HP’s largest localization team, HP ACG (Application and Content Globalization), regularly reviews its panel of vendors. Last year, an in-depth benchmark was conducted in partnership with HP Procurement for Western and Nordic languages. In addition to applying standard vendor selection processes, HP decided to test a new approach, asking the vendors to participate in a Reverse e-Auction (real-time bidding on sample projects). Floch will discuss the process they used, the controversy around the pricing of localization services and the steps ACG took to mitigate this, along with the results and key learnings.
Add Content Quality Management to Your Localization Process
Dr. Andrew Bredenkamp - Co-Founder and CEO, acrolinx
Chris Wong - Senior Software Engineer, Idiom Technologies
Software-enforced markup, structure, repurposing and reuse enable rapid production and distribution of multiple information products in multiple languages. However, if the content that is being reused, repurposed, and translated is inconsistent, grammatically incorrect, and difficult to understand or translate, a less than ideal user experience is propagated faster and farther than ever. A growing number of forward-looking companies have addressed this situation with a renewed focus on the quality of content that is being localized. And they have found that attention to source quality pays real financial dividends, especially in the area of translation and localization. Technology to facilitate end-to-end terminology lifecycle management is available. Learn how software can automatically harvest terminology from your existing corpus, manage changes and additions to the terminology database in a structured, workflow-enabled environment, and leverage your terminology database for use in controlled authoring and translation.
OAXAL – Open Architecture for XML Authoring and Localization
Andrzej Zydroń - CTO, XML-INTL
OAXAL is destined to change the way we write, translate and publish technical documentation. A new reference architecture for XML Authoring and Localization, it is based on existing standards from LISA OSCAR, Unicode, OASIS and W3C ITS. Zydroń will outline the very real benefits that OAXAL offers to implementers, including localization process automation, improved TM matching and user choice in terms of tools and technologies.
Global Authoring, Terminology, and Content Management. Considering Costs, Workflow, Standards and Technology
Moderated by Kara Warburton - Terminologist, IBM
Christie Fidura - Senior Product Marketing Manager, SDL International
Signe Rirdance - EuroTermBank Director, Tilde
Terminology is now being recognized as the foundation for standardizing information across the enterprise, which improves communication, product usability, information retrievability, manageability and translation facilitation. This group session by three members of the LISA Terminology SIG will discuss terminology as a business-enabling asset from three perspectives: optimizing content, using technology to drive agility into content management, and realizing opportunities from federated terminology sharing. Approaches to “translating” terms and other content need to adapt to the “agile” information strategy, and standards and technology are key tools for achieving this goal. The emerging trend of sharing some terminology in federated, collaborative environments will bring new ways to achieve business benefits and cost reductions.
10 Steps to a Better Localization Project
Lior Cohen - VP Marketing and Sales, Net-Translators Ltd.
Cohen will share ten practical suggestions garnered from the archives of localization projects undertaken by Net-Translators. He will describe the pitfalls involved in actual localization projects, and offer some easy-to-apply best practices. He will also cover the essential steps that are crucial for completing a successful localization project. His presentation is a definite must for anyone who is new to managing localization projects.
Optimising Multilingual Workflows and Business Information Management in a Global Economy
Dr. Adriane Rinsche - Managing Director, Language Technology Centre
LTC invites all LISA Forum Europe attendees to be among the first to experience LTC Worx, a new breed of software that will dramatically improve the way they work. It is the first system that can handle all types of multilingual business processes – from localization and translation to interpreting, consultancy and language training. LTC Worx adapts to your way of working – thanks to flexible, customizable workflows – and manages your entire business process form quotation request to invoicing. It has innovative collaboration features and offers the most comprehensive multi-site functionality available. Nearly a decade of experience, RD, and working with customers have gone into the development of LTC Worx.
Decontextualization in a Multilingual Environment
Karina Martínez Ferber - Operations Manager, euroscript International
Content reusability, and thus decontextualisation, is a main element of CMS. Content creation processes have to change as terminological and stylistic consistency become ever more critical. However, optimization of translation processes is often seen rather as a “natural” and automatic side effect, than as the real pre-requisite that it is for the effectiveness of a multilingual CMS. Martínez Ferber will present how the adaptation of translation processes to CMS requirements can only be achieved through close cooperation between the language service provider (in-house or external) and content authors. She will address the “typical” scenarios which the service provider encounters within a CM workflow, what aspects of translation services are affected, and how the service provider can interact with content authors, translators and proofreaders to ensure multilingual CMS success.
SDL TRADOS 2007 & SDL MultiTerm 2007 – What’s New
Michael Wetzel - Product Manager, SDL International
Wetzel will provide a quick hands-on overview of the major changes introduced in the 2007 releases of SDL TRADOS and SDL MultiTerm, including the two most recent service packs.
Regulatory Issues in the Localization Industry: Optimizing Business Compliance and Minimizing Risk in Today’s Global-Local Sales and Services Environment
Moderated by Michael Anobile - Managing Director, LISA
Claude Lamoureux - Multilingual Information Services Manager, PerkinElmer Life and Analytical Sciences, Wallac Oy
Donald Barabé - Vice President, Canadian Government Translation Bureau
Lyra Spratt-Manning - General Manager, USA - West, Interverbum Corporation
Michael Kemmann - Managing Director, ADAPT
The impact that regulatory issues have on the localization business is increasing worldwide from many different perspectives. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the U.S. brought legal and product compliance procedures to the forefront of business globalization. It continues to change the way many industries are managing multilingual content and qualifying their language service providers. This session will address how clients and their “problem-solving” partners work together to minimize risks and high costs, while assuring time-to-market and quality products and documentation.
A Globalization Case Study – How to Measure in Korean
Alison Toon - Translation and Localization Manager, Content Management Services, Hewlett-Packard
In late June this year, South Korea announced that they were going metric, and that all measurements in imperial must be converted to metric as of July 1! Obviously, the implication to global companies was huge, and immediate sharing of information was essential. This case study will describe the way the information was communicated, the questions that were asked, and the mad scramble that ensues each and every time a standard like this changes.
Achieving “World Readiness” in a Software Company – Lessons Being Learned
Dirk Meyer - Product Manager, Globalization Corporate Product Management, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Dirk provides an indepth overview of Abobe’s globalization process. Underscoring their “World Readiness” initiative Dirk explains the challenges of developing products for international markets and how to support customers world-wide.
The Business Demands for Terminology Standards
Kara Warburton - Terminologist, IBM
Changes in global business strategies have increased demands for structured terminology data (1) that can be used to increase productivity and quality, and (2) that can be easily interchanged between companies, information processing applications and delivery media. These demands require practical standards. This presentation will describe the driving factors and the resulting needs, and will summarize what is being done in the standards community to address them. The status of the submission of TBX as an ISO standard, and of TBX-Core as another terminology format, will also be presented briefly.
Automating the Localization Process
Marion Mordenti - Localization Program Manager, Hewlett-Packard
The ITRC is a HP support portal targeted at IT professionals. Over the past five years, it has gone from a 100% manual to a fully automated translation/localization (T&L) process. This process improvement helped the group to address time-to-market, as well as to reduce the localization and linguistic testing costs release after release. Mordenti will describe “before and after” and illustrate the different tools and best practices put in place to enable the ITRC to attain full T&L process automation.
Using Globalization Management Systems as Part of the Overall Content Lifecycle
Moderated by Eric Nicod
Paul Hampton - Product Marketing Director, SDL International
Yan Yu - Director of Business Development – Europe, Idiom Technologies
Robert Timms - thebigword
Paul Mangell - Director, Alpha CRC
This session will present how Globalization Management Systems and translation automation technologies and processes are being used today, with the emphasis on customer applications, workflow and organizational requirements.
SDL will describe how their customers are voicing the need for a solution that allows them to manage both (1) the creation of their multilingual content and (2) the storage of their localized assets in a central repository to enable greater reuse. In other words, they have a Global Information Management requirement to manage the localization supply chain within a CMS environment.
Idiom will share how it is responding to customers who view translation automation as the main challenge to producing and repurposing multilingual content. Most of their users today produce diverse materials for web sites, user documentation, software and marketing, which require translation as part of a global strategy.
thebigword will describe how it uses GMS technology to localize content held in a CMS to realize benefits for its customers, e.g., allowing them to completely outsource the entire localization process, while still maintaining full visibility and control of projects.
Alpha CRC will share its experience using GMS/CMS technologies by discussing how the translation/localization process works by plugging into its clients’ own systems to provide them with language and project management services.
Project Management Cultural Communication Strategies, Tools and Logistics
Inese Auzina - Department Manager, Tilde
Each country, regardless of its size, has its own communication culture. When teams from several countries must work together, their cultural differences can become an unnecessary barrier that impedes their progress towards a common goal. Auzina will share examples that show how this barrier can be overcome successfully, along with practical ideas on how to enable a cross-cultural and geographically distributed team to produce results that are more than the sum of its parts. Based on the experience of Project Managers who work across cultures and time zones on a daily basis to produce high-quality translations on a tight schedule, Auzina will also share several strategies for managing communication issues and point out which ones work best.
The Next Step in Translation Project Management Automation
François Tardif - Head of Customer Service and Support – Europe, MultiCorpora
Tardif will lead an interactive presentation to demonstrate how language service agencies, both small and large, and corporate language departments can (1) significantly improve their end-to-end processes, (2) improve the quality of their in-house and outsourced translations, (3) reduce turnaround and (4) control costs with a combined TextBase TM and workflow management solution. Already a leading provider of multilingual asset management solutions, MultiCorpora has partnered with Plunet to integrate MultiTrans with BusinessManagerTM, the industry’s best-in-class translation workflow system. There has never been a better time to embrace the use of an automated multilingual asset management solution!
Translation Tools and Technologies: What the Future Holds
Lisa Seeman - CEO, UB Access
Vitaly Borok - CEO, Multilize
Kirti Vashee - VP of Sales and Marketing, Language Weaver
Ambiguity is inevitable in source content, but it makes the translator’s life difficult. The majority of “wrong translations” are due to ambiguous source content. Ambiguity means long test cycles, and linguistic testing is expensive. Ambiguities are also fatal to machine translation. Can you eliminate ambiguities and vagueness before you begin the translation process without restricting authoring styles? This panel will show how new technology can identify and explain all types of ambiguous, unclear phrases in the source content and pass on to the translator the ambiguous content with the meaning explained, inside the translator’s normal working environment. Translations become unambiguous, most of the “wrong translations” are eliminated ahead of time, and test cycles are reduced. Further, by integration into translation engines, machine translation can be guaranteed to maintain meaning.
Localization for Different Cultural Backgrounds - How Knowledge Technologies Can Change the Paradigm
Lisa Seeman - CEO, UB Access
Localization involves communication across barriers of understanding. “Meaning” however, comes from the understanding and assumptions from both the content creator and the user. This means that content includes design, metaphors, navigation, tasks and images - all of which must be mapped to cultural indexes for adaptation to be truly global. Seeman will explore a generic solution that addresses adaptive interfaces from a global perspective, even for content designed for one particular user group’s needs. She will discuss a semantic web, knowledge-based approach to automated adaptation of content so that meaning is not lost for different cultures and subcultures.
Outsourcing in Eastern Europe – Strengths and Hurdles to Be Overcome
Irina Niculiu - Global Marketing Manager, altalingua EES
Niculiu will discuss the reasons that foreign companies are choosing Eastern Europe as an offshore hub, including the benefits and hurdles to be overcome. She will also introduce altalingua EES, a multilingual localization services provider located in Eastern Europe.
MultiTrans 4.2
François Tardif - Head of Customer Service and Support – Europe, MultiCorpora
Organizations that operate globally always have several thousand previously translated documents scattered throughout the company, containing valuable terminology that remains locked away. Unlocking 100% of these translations empowers all collaborators, authors, translators, revisers and external service providers. MultiTrans promotes increased synergies, saves research time and improves consistency. Unlike traditional translation memory tools, the TextBase TM can leverage more repetitions since it is designed to operate at the full-text level rather than from a laborious database of pre-aligned sentences out of context. Tardif will explore this innovative approach, which has been proven in many large governmental organizations, LSPs and global enterprises.
A Multi-level QA Infrastructure for Localization Projects
Kirill Solovyev - Software & Localization Engineer, ITI Ltd.
Quality is always important for localization projects, as is quality assurance (QA) of localized materials. But how does one organize QA to provide the maximum benefit for a project? When should QA start, who should be doing it and what tools should be used? Solovyev will share some of ITI’s experiences and offer an insight into its own QA infrastructure, which encompasses multiple levels – from web-enabled terminology management solutions to server-based QA systems that support collaboration.
Integrated Terminology Management - from Distribution to Contribution
Ioannis Iakovidis - General Manager/Technology, Interverbum Corporation
One of the major challenges that organizations face today is how to set up and distribute their terminology instantly and continuously to different user groups working in different geographical areas. At the same time, they want terminology to be quality-assured, up-to-date, and easily accessible, so that users are alerted when using incorrect terminology. As terminology management becomes an integrated part of business processes, its status will rise from being of interest to a limited group, i.e. a few terminologists and documentation specialists, to a tool of strategic importance that is used every day by everyone within the organization. Iakovidis will present Interverbum’s and Lingsoft’s terminology lifecycle management solution: a quality-controlled workflow that makes terminology changes instantly available and enables users to become active contributors.
Terminology is Gaining So Much Attention in Today’s Global Business Community
Moderated by Rebecca Ray - Managing Editor and Consulting Partner, LISA
Kara Warburton - Terminologist, IBM
Signe Rirdance - EuroTermBank Director, Tilde
Christie Fidura - Senior Product Marketing Manager, SDL International
Christine Hug - Senior Terminotics Specialist, Canadian Government Translation Bureau
This panel will enable both the presenters (no slides allowed!) and the audience to share why terminology is gaining so much attention in places where the word “terminology” wasn’t even used before. Everyone will have the opportunity to share how terminology interrelates with the issues addressed during the Forum. Along the way, it will cover the main challenges that people are still experiencing – both internally and with customers/partners – and how technical and business standards can be applied to address them.
