Main Content
Washington 2003
Accelerating Global Understanding
Through Best Practice • Services • Language Technology and Open Standards
Hyatt Regency, Washington, D.C., USA
8-12 December 2003
The LISA Forum is the place where key stakeholders in the global information society come together to develop a better understanding of the opportunities and issues faced by enterprises and governments alike - and how they can best be addressed through effective implementation of language technologies.
Global business is evolving at pace few of us ever anticipated. The accelerated convergence between multiple technologies from telecommunications, through to information and communication systems is driving the need for efficient internationalization, localization and translation to help companies reduce their operating costs across countries, languages and cultures.
This has resulted in the development of new products and services, as well as ways of conducting multilingual business and ecommerce.
Through case studies, business advisories, workgroup discussions and management seminars participants will examine today’s market sectors and progress in the localization industry.
Understanding Best Practices in Selecting the Best Solutions
Alan Guibord - Chairman, CEO and Founder, The Advisory Council
In today’s uncertain world, what is the most effective process IT leaders need to follow to create business value while enhancing their careers? Mr. Guibord will help frame the current Technology landscape and offer suggestions for taking advantage of existing investments. He will also offer insights into emerging technology trends from a management perspective. In addition he will provide a step-by-step process for setting the course for the future. He will offer real life examples of successful strategies as well as what issues are on the minds of his many Technology clients. Audience participation is encouraged.
Meeting the Internet Challenge - Delivering Customized Content and Technology
John McGeehan - Senior Partner, Director of Engineering, OgilvyInteractive
One of the driving needs of OgilvyInteractive’s software development over the last 3 years has been management of marketing messaging for their clients. At times it has taken the form of full three-tiered transactional systems, which deliver customized content according to the users’ preference, or simply Information Architecture and Content Strategy for a CMS. The question this product was developed to answer was “How can I, a multi-national corporation, automate ordering and delivery of direct marketing materials for our business partners, meanwhile ensuring materials are on-brand and consistent throughout the global market?” While the hypothetical question may seem dry and lifeless, Mr. McGeehan will bring it alive with special relevance to the GILT community.
CASE STUDY: “Find Out What Your Global Customer Base Thinks...”
Brooke Watts - System Project Manager, Satmetrix Systems
Liesl Leary - Senior Globalization Consultant, RWS Group, LLC
Loyal customers are the principal driver of profits, yet few companies have realized the strategic advantages of measuring customer satisfaction in a global context. “Find Out What Your Global Customer Base Thinks” explores the next steps after localization to understand how effective your in-country presence really is in regards to customer loyalty. This case study will highlight Satmetrix Systems and their relationship with enterprise localization solution provider RWS Group to discuss the importance of consistently measuring for customer satisfaction and the best methods by which to do this. The presentation will also discuss Satmetrix’s own satisfaction with their localization vendor and will demonstrate the importance of a true localization partnership to your global customer base.
Optimizing MT through Analysis, Customization and Terminology
Mary Flanagan - Executive Vice President, CTO, Multilingual Media
Kara Warburton - Terminologist, IBM
Mary Flanagan, an internationally known expert in MT applications, will outline what you need to know about machine translation systems: when to use them, how to customize them, what to expect, and how to analyze the results. Kara Warburton, a terminologist at IBM, will describe the role of terminology in optimizing MT results, using a case study of an IBM MT pilot project.
Process and Security in Today’s Language Services Industry
Anthony Clarke - Chief Information Officer, CLS Communication
This session will overview the Process and Security in today’s language services industry in the following steps: The challenge facing today’s language service providers: Translation is not simply translation! It comprises a complex process beginning with the desire of a client to have something translated into one or more other languages and finishing with delivery to the client of a product which meets his requirements in terms of speed, quality and price (not necessarily in that order). The business process: Well-defined and manageable processes are key to maintaining productivity and efficiency throughout the process chain. Security requirements: The task at hand, therefore, is how to construct this process so that it is, on the one hand, flexible and adaptable, accessible and manageable while, on the other, being secure and low risk. Interaction of process and security: Once the order reaches us via this secure path, another part of the secure workflow process kicks in - document processing. Problems arising and how to solve these: In order to keep the risk of security breaches low, we must ensure that process security is part of the company’s overall security policy - showing how processes and security are intrinsically inseparable from one another.
Industry Ethics: Professionalism in the GILT Community
Arle Lommel - Publications Manager LISA
LISA has fielded a number of queries recently concerning ethics guidelines for the GILT industry. After examining current guidelines from other groups, we felt that there was a need for a set of guidelines that deal with practical concerns and questions specific to the GILT industry. This presentation will discuss the guidelines as well as feedback received from a public draft distributed in October 2003, and plans for the future, including how interested parties can contribute to the ethics guidelines.
Enterprise Terminology: A Holistic Approach to the Health of Your Business!
Kara Warburton - Terminologist, IBM
Kara Warburton, IBM Terminologist and chair of the LISA Terminology SIG, will talk about why managing terminology should be a part of your overall business strategy. Detecting and fixing terminology problems early helps you to deliver quality products while facilitating the localization process. It is a common mistake to focus on managing terminology as a translation activity. Addressing terminology from the source opens up additional benefits and opportunities to improve quality, save costs, and repurpose your terminology assets into other areas that can benefit your company such as machine translation and search technologies.
Filling the Global Communications Gap - Enterprise Voice
Ashish Vora - Senior Speech Applications Engineer, Oracle
Marcus Graham - Founder and CEO, GM Voices
Michael Bergelson - President and CEO, Audium
Bruce Balentine - EVP & Chief Scientist, Enterprise Integration Group
Kris Hopkins - CEO & Founder, Newfound Communications
Dr. Amy Neustein - Founder and CEO, Linguistic Technology Systems
This panel session will outline the progress of voice technologies that are helping companies achieve the global communication goal alongside with multilingual content management gains in recent years. The panel will highlight key development areas that are experiencing adoption growth and investment, provide clear ROI gains, the multilingual speech needs, multi modal environments and customer service enhancements in engaging the global market.
Operations Review: The World Bank Group Translation Management System Implementation Project
Kannan Srinivasan - Senior Information Officer, World Bank
Fred Cochard - Translator and CAT Manager, World Bank
Barbara Jax - Project Manager, World Bank
The session will give a descriptive overview of the implementation project of an automated translation management system at the World Bank Group. It will be outlining not only the initial implementation in the World Bank’s Translation Department but also the project’s ongoing scale-up to the whole World Bank Group. The presentation will be given by three core implementation team members who will provide details of their areas of involvement in the project. Having three core implementation team members presenting provides a real multi-angled expert perspective of the venture as well as giving session participants the opportunity to ask questions and give feedback.
Streaming Content: A Model for the Efficient Localization of Content and Code
Paula Shannon - Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Lionbridge Technologies
This industry veteran will present an objective, vendor agnostic presentation on migration to a streaming model for the localization of both code and content. As products migrate from episodic releases to subscription, hosted, or web-based updates, and personalized content is driven to be available ‘real-time’, project-based localization ceases to be efficient. How does the Localization industry need to evolve to embrace this change? What is the impact on the customer base, the service providers and technology firms? The presentation will share detailed information on the efficiencies to be gained, the productivity increases, and the collaboration needed across the entire customer-service provider-technology chain. It will also focus on non-promotional case studies from outside the IT sector.
Globalizing Enterprise Content: A Reference Model and Applicable Standards
Pierre Cadieux - President, i18N Inc.
The global enterprise must produce a large volume of content (manuals, brochures, service notes, Web pages, etc.) in many languages. The cost is enormous and finding better ways to manage multilingual content is becoming a C-level priority. Globalization Management Systems (GMS) are complex systems designed for just this purpose, namely to help manage the localization process as well as the enterprise’s linguistic assets. A model of GMS systems will be presented to illustrate the various steps, components and issues involved. Using the model as reference, we will see what standards exist, which ones are required, and why they are important.
Managing Localization Quality Assurance
Matta Saikali - VP Testing Services, i18N Inc.
This session will answer the following questions: What tasks and error categories are involved in l10n testing? Localization test organizations are faced with different types of localization subjects, how do they cope while maintaining a high quality of their deliverables? How do they get organized? What is the cost of quality? When to outsource and what? And how to reduce the cost of localization testing?
XML - Translation Memory
Andrzej Zydron - Technical Director, XML Intl Ltd.
This session will cover the basics of xml:tm - XML based text memory. xml:tm is an XML namespace based technology designed to reduce the costs of translating and authoring XML based documents. The xml:tm namespace is seeded into the XML document at the beginning of the document life cycle. It maintains a unique identifier for every segment of text in the document, which permits the perfect alignment of any translation. When updates to the document are processed by xml:tm, previously translated segments are recognized and perfectly matched by their unique identifier. The xml:tm text memory automatically provides the perfect matching through the medium of XML syntax within the documents themselves. The memory is encoded within the documents themselves thereby eliminating the traditional need to manage and hold translation memories separately.
The perfectly matched text segments require no intervention from the translator who only has to focus on any new or changed text. Traditional translation memory systems work on the basis of leveraged matching - the exact source of the text is not identified so each match has to be verified by a translator - an expensive process. Xml:tm exploits the mechanisms that are inherent within XML to provide a better solution to maintaining and translating XML based documents. xml:tm can also provide traditional leveraged memory support plus linguistically enhanced fuzzy matching - something most translation memory systems fail to do today.
Translation Web Services - Where it’s Working and How?
Dr. Stephen Flinter - Chief Architect, Connect Global Solutions
Web Services are one of the hot buzzwords of recent years. But is it all just hype, or is there something of real value behind web services? In this presentation, Dr. Flinter will provide an overview of the work of the OASIS Translation Web Services technical committee. This committee is defining a web service standard to be used by the translation and localization industry. The talk will provide an introduction to what web services are, and how they work, as well as describe how web services can be used in the localization business.
Offshore Outsourcing: Legal Strategies for Your Business Plan
Mark Traphagen - Partner, Collier Shannon Scott
The Gartner Group calls accelerated offshore outsourcing by IT customers and external service providers (ESPs) “the most significant human capital shift that has occurred in the history of the IT services industry.” Despite unfavorable press and concern in Congress, Gartner predicts that the demand for lower costs will move one out of every 10 jobs within U.S.-based IT vendors and IT service providers to emerging markets by year end 2004 in “a harbinger of changes in other countries” - such as the Australia, Canada, and EU Member States - that pursue global sourcing models. But are lower costs today worth risking the loss of essential intellectual property and human resources? Can any enterprise that doesn’t outsource offshore be competitive in an IT market in which “cost is king?” Could legislation raise the cost of offshore outsourcing or restrict government procurement to domestic IT services?
This session will discuss why your enterprise should have a legal strategy for offshore outsourcing that reinforces your business plan, and will suggest ways to identify and manage legal risks and review prospects for legislation and possible barriers to market access.
Maintaining Global Content: Managing Content Across Borders
Alison Toon - Translation and Localization Manager, Hewlett Packard
Sean McNamara - Managing Director, FileNet
Jessica Roland - International Product Operations Group Product Manager, Documentum Inc.
This panel session will address the management of global content: content that may be created in one country and used in many others, translated and localized, published in many forms and through different media. The members of the panel will share insights into the evolving world of global content management, from the content management system perspective and the user’s viewpoint. Best practices, stumbling blocks, and the biggest challenges and successes will also be presented.
From Code to XLIFF: Bridging the Chasm
Dr. Stephen Flinter - Chief Architect, Connect Global Solutions
As we all know, XLIFF is aimed at addressing the problem of having to maintain a number of different localization tools to support different file formats used in both software and documents. That is, XLIFF acts as the “lingua franca” of the localization and translation communities, and allows tools makers to concentrate on providing features rather than new file filters. However, to a certain extent, the development of XLIFF has moved rather than solved the problem. Now the issue is not so much ensuring that a given toolset has the appropriate file filters, it is figuring out how we translate native file formats into XLIFF. This again leads to the necessity of maintaining multiple file filters. In this talk, Flinter will present a more generic way to tackle the issue of translating native text-based file formats (such as source code in any software language, HTML and XML, etc.) into XLIFF.
Using XML and Localization
Yves Savourel - Localization Solutions Architect, RWS Group
This session will discuss how XML can be used in the localization process from different viewpoints. It will look at the different aspects that make XML attractive for localization tasks and explore the various ways to take advantage of XML, even if the original data to localize are not in an XML format. The session will also discuss how to translate XML documents and how to overcome some of the issues XML-enabled tools still have. Concrete examples and demonstrations will be used to illustrate the session.
How Global Trade Negotiations Will Impact GILT Industry
Robert Cassidy - Director of International Trade Services, International Trade & Customs, Collier Shannon Scott
The Bush Administration has embarked on the most extensive set of trade negotiations of the last 50 years, ranging from bilateral and regional free trade agreements with nearly every region in the world to the multilateral trade negotiations called the Doha Round. At the same time, the global trading system is learning to adjust to the entrance of China into the multilateral trading system under the WTO and whether the new Chinese leadership will effectively implement those obligations. All these negotiations will have an enormous impact on the GILT Industry, not only in developing the broader trading system under which you will supply your services but, even more important, the specific provisions in each of those agreements that will set the conditions under which those services can be supplied.
Robert Cassidy, the former Assistant U.S. Trade Representative responsible for Asia and for negotiating the terms under which China and Taiwan would enter the WTO will review the progress of these ongoing trade negotiations and analyze the impact that they will have on bilateral, regional and multilateral market access for LISA companies.
Building Standards for Global Speech Applications
Ashish Vora - Senior Speech Applications Engineer, Oracle
Bruce Balentine - EVP & Chief Scientist, Enterprise Integration Group
Kris Hopkins - CEO & Founder, Newfound Communications
Dr. Amy Neustein - Founder and CEO, Linguistic Technology Systems
The global enterprise have information in many languages and in many different areas. In the past decade, open standards have accelerated development of voice applications which are beginning to take advantage of the information stored in text form. This workgroup discussion will focus on the requirements of global speech applications, pinpointing areas that will for collaboration and development, especially in areas involving multilingual integration and information exchange with other systems/formats.
“Project Churn”: Reality-based Project Management
Kenneth (Sandy) McKethan Jr. - Globalization Project Manager, IBM
Project churn happens, even with the best planning, even in the best of companies, even with well-intentioned managers. When such repetitive, disruptive project change does occur, what is its impact to cost, schedule, and resources? How can one prepare for it? Can it be harnessed?
This presentation is aimed at enabling the busy globalization or translation project manager to plan realistically for change, and to even embrace change rather than to just brace for it. Identification and control will be shown as real responses to common sources of project change. This presentation will present a practical approach for quantifying and managing churn. The intent is to equip the language professional to better set stakeholder expectations by more accurately factoring change into pricing, cost, and schedule planning.
