White Papers

LISA members are invited to submit their publications, white papers, articles, and reports for a free listing and link on this page. Please submit your documents to webmastergo@lisaaway.org.

• GB 18030 White Paper, Willem Stoeller, International Consulting LLC
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  Due to the increasing demand for software products in the People’s Republic of China, along with the government requirement that such software products be compliant with GB 18030-2005, many US software companies are concerned about how to make their applications compliant with this relatively new standard. In fact many operating systems and major applications are already GB18030-2005 compliant, including formal certification.

• Transforming Translation and Localization: How to reduce costs and speed up time to market with an optimized approach to documentation., Thomas W. Hurysz, Xerox Corporation
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  In an increasingly interconnected world, the ability to market products and services around the world is fast becoming a requirement for success. After all, it helps companies dramatically expand their customer base. And that opens the door to powerful opportunities for revenue growth.

• Localization: A Guide to Weathering the Economic Storm, Shunee Yee, CSOFT International
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  Today’s economy is presenting many new hurdles for US businesses. With disheartening news comingfrom all directions, it is difficult to know where to turn. In the guide below, reaching new markets is presented as the solution to the unstable financial environment plaguing US companies.

• The Continuing Evolution of Automated Translation Technology: RbMT vs. SMT, Kirti Vashee
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  After more than 50 years of empty promises and repeated failures, amazingly, interest in machine translation (MT) continues to grow. It is still something that almost everybody hopes will work someday. Is machine translation finally ready to deliver on its promise? What are the issues with this technology and what will it take to make it work? This overview provides a lay perspective on the ongoing discussion in the evolution of the two main approaches to MT that are in use today (Rule-based MT – RbMT and Statistical Machine Translation – SMT), and attempts to answer these questions.

• Terminology Matters, Christie Fidura, SDL International
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  Reliable, accurate, and high-quality terminology is the spearhead of a successful Global Information Management strategy. Centralized terminology management saves time and costs by enabling the efficient production and distribution of multilingual content. It is a catalyst in driving more visitors to global websites, bringing products to market faster, driving customer loyalty, and reducing queries to Customer Support, all of which ensure the stability and growth of future enterprise revenue streams.

• Corpora & e-Learning Survey 2006, The MeLLANGE project team
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  MeLLANGE (Multilingual eLearning in LANGuage Engineering) is a European Union funded project which aims to provide translation students and professionals with an opportunity to acquire and/or update translation-related skills to fulfill the demands of the global market place. Many studies (e.g. the EU-sponsored SPICE-PREP, the LETRAC survey on the curricula for translators, and the translators’ section of the LEIT Industry Needs Survey) have shown that translators constantly need to acquire new skills and demonstrate a high degree of flexibility and mobility (in accordance with objectives 3 and 4 of the “Documents Uniques de Programmation 2000-2006 (DOCUP)” of the EU). MeLLANGE was launched on 1 October 2004 and will run until 30 September 2007. The project builds on the outcomes of eCoLoRe, another EU funded project which was completed in April 2005.

• Cultural Dimensions and Global Web Design: What? So What? Now What?, Aaron Marcus and Associates
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  User-interface design is influenced by cultural differences. Cultures around the world have different patterns of social behavior and interaction that have led anthropologists and scientists of communication to develop culture models whose dimensions describe these differences. This paper describes an effort to collect expert opinion about these cultural dimensions and how they influence user-interface design. The goal was to determine the most important dimensions. Data collected from over 50 experts in the field of user-interface design are presented in this survey. This paper is an edited extract of a much longer thesis by one of the authors.

• Culture vs. Corporate: Global Web UI Design, Aaron Marcus and Associates
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  This white paper analyzes corporate global Web user-interface design standards under the influence of culture differences. Culture differences are described in terms of dimensions of culture, as analyzed by Geert Hofstede, among others. Examples from the Web illustrate the impact of culture on corporate global Web user-interface design.

• A Practical Set of Culture Dimensions for Global User-Interface Development, Aaron Marcus and Associates
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  This paper introduces dimensions of culture, as analyzed by Geert Hofstede in his classic study of cultures in organizations, and considers how they might affect user-interface designs. Examples from the Web illustrate the cultural dimensions.

• Cross-Cultural User-Interface Design, Aaron Marcus and Associates
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  Cross-cultural user-interface designers should account for dimensions of cultures, e.g., the cultural anthropologist Hofstede’s five dimensions when they conside potential design strategies. Recent publications suggest other deep cultural influences on the way people think, act, and feel, which suggest there may be cultural biases in traditional industry usability precepts.

• Cross-Cultural Communication: How Can You Deliver What the User Really Wants?, European Telecommunications Standards Institute
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  When communicating with another person or accessing an information service, everyone wants to be able to do so in ways that are compatible with their language and cultural preferences. This very obvious sounding user requirement might appear to be an easy one to satisfy. This is a simple requirement to state, but anyone who believes that it is simple to satisfy is probably failing to see the real complexity that lies behind it.

• DITA is Ready for Primetime... Are You Ready for DITA?, Innodata Isogen
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  The emergence of Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) as a general-purpose XML schema for technical documentation represents a significant step forward and opportunity for organizations that create extensive amounts of technical documentation and other related content. DITA offers organizations a ready means for structuring product-support content and the rapid adoption of DITA by XML technology vendors provides a number of options for implementing DITA productively.

• Can You Afford Not to Have a Corporate Termbase? Reasons to Maintain a Corporate Termbase and Some Pitfalls to Avoid, Monika Röthlisberger, CLS Communication
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  Every company, regardless of size, is continually creating and maintaining a certain company-specific language. Names of products and services, titles of employees and names and abbreviations for departments and projects are the most obvious elements of this type of language. Terms used in the industry the company belongs to are also part of this ‘code’. Corporate language stretches even further: Many companies decide on preferred terms to use when communicating with clients, employees and partners, in order to make their voice clearer and more profiled.

• Dynamic Content Software Strategies Consulting Service, Innodata Isogen
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  The concept of outsourcing has grown quite familiar to business professionals over the past five years. While it may be an increasingly hot political topic, more and more company executives in virtually every industry are researching the possibility of outsourcing some components of their operations. In fact, the Associated Press reported in July that the outsourcing market for software and back office services in India alone reached $17.2 billion for the year ending in March 2005.

• Untangle Your Information... Four Steps to Integrating Knowledge with Topic Maps, Innodata Isogen
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  For years, organizations have sought to improve the way they share information and knowledge with employees, partners and customers. But the platforms that exist to deliver such content – Web sites and corporate databases – are not designed to support or facilitate an integrated knowledge management strategy. As a result, this goal has remained somewhat elusive for many organizations.

• Don’t Get Caught Offshore with the Wrong Partner: Seven Tips for Selecting the Best Outsourcing Partner, Innodata Isogen
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  In the financial services industry, razor-thin margins for many product offerings are compelling firms to improve their bottom line. Moreover, in a competitive marketplace where offerings and features are often quite similar or quickly copied, insurance companies, banks and brokerage firms are increasingly beginning to view their operations as a source of competitive advantage. To stay ahead, financial services firms are constantly seeking new and more efficient ways to cut costs, improve response time and speed time to market. As a result, they are turning to a wide array of potential remedies, which include outsourcing entire business processes to third party providers.

• Outsourcing Editorial Services... Seven Tips for Reducing Costs and Improving Quality, Innodata Isogen
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  Faced with rising costs and stiffer competition, commercial publishers are constantly looking for new ways to reduce costs, while continuing to create new and compelling content. To meet this challenge, many publishers are outsourcing selected editorial functions, such as copy editing, indexing and abstracting and content creation to third party providers.

• The Impact of Culture and Language in Global Marketing, One Planet Corporation
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  Increasing global competition for expanding markets has forced multinational companies to change their marketing strategies and alter their organizational structures. The goal is to enhance their competitiveness and to ensure proper positioning in order to capitalize on opportunities in the global marketplace.

• Turn Structured Product Labeling into a Business Advantage... Three Pitfalls to Avoid on the Road to Successful Compliance, Innodata Isogen
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  For many pharmaceutical companies, the task of managing product information is about to become even more complicated. The decision by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to mandate Structured Product Labeling will add another layer of complexity to a process that already requires pharmaceutical companies to shepherd huge volumes of content through multiple internal and external checkpoints.

• Rich Data Products... Five Steps for Building New and Self-Sustaining Revenue Streams, Innodata Isogen
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  Static or declining revenues from advertising and other traditional sources are forcing many companies in the publishing and information services business to step up their pursuit of new revenue streams. But if they look closely enough, they might find that one of the most promising sources actually lies within their existing resources – their own content.

• Bid Globally, Delight Customers Locally - The eBay GMS Success Story, Idiom Technologies
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  eBay, The World’s Online Marketplace®, selected Waltham, Massachusetts-based Idiom Technologies, Inc. as its primary provider of globalization content management systems. Idiom’s unique WorldServer 6 software supports eBay’s internal goals of streamlining globalization and content management processes, and accelerating the translation of multilingual content produced by a rapidly growing number of non-technical contributors located around the globe. After the conclusion of eBay’s rigorous vendor comparison process and a competitive on-site pilot in October 2002, WorldServer 6 achieved top scores and beat out other leading content management and globalization finalists. More important to eBay, WorldServer 6 may preserve and extend eBay’s existing, customized global trading platform, with the goal of providing eBay with a single product offering combining the leading globalization technology with costeffective, easy-to-use globalization content management functionality.

• Testing “Prompt”: The Development of a Rapid Post-Editing Service, Catherine Hyland, CLS Corporate Language Services AG
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  CLS Corporate Language Services AG recently began offering the rapid post-editing of raw machine translation output to meet the rising demand for this service among clients. What is meant by rapid post-editing is the rough correction of machine translated texts with emphasis on speed and denotative accuracy. In the preliminary phase of the project, CLS conducted a test among four inhouse translators. The objective was to gain practical experience, establish workfl ow requirements and set up effi cient post-editing processes. Text samples were selected from several subject categories, and post-edited in English, German and French. The participants were given 10, 15 and 30 minutes per page to complete their tasks. This paper aims to present the results of the post-editing test at CLS Corporate Language Services AG, and to examine the conditions under which a rapid post-editing service is feasible in a commercial environment.

• Impact of Globalization and Knowledge Management Within High Tech Manufacturing Environment, Junaid Nasir, IBM Ireland
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  This paper seeks to investigate the process of knowledge transfer. Management in High-Tech I.T. Organisations is addressing the issue of knowledge sharing due to their growing awareness of the importance of knowledge to organisational success. To manage and measure knowledge-based resources is one of the most important challenges for the modern organizations.

• The Full-Text Multilingual Corpus: Breaking the Translation Memory Bottleneck, MultiCorpora R&D Inc.
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  Driven by fast-paced global competition where the time-to-market of new products, services and communications into multiple languages and cultures is mission-critical, organizations are increasingly demanding translation services that provide faster turnaround while maintaining the highest level of quality. A key driver behind the need for speed and quality is the ongoing explosion of web-based content and the related expectations of content freshness and quality. Operating in a competitive and typically fixed-price environment, translation service providers need to respond with significant gains in translator productivity while continuously improving translation quality.

• Globalization of Voice Applications: Issues, Applications, and Challenges for the Future, Ashish Vora, Speech Laboratory, Oracle Corporation
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  Globalizing software (writing software for multiple languages and locales) is a challenging aspect of the entire software development cycle, and one that all too often is composed of ad hoc processes and frameworks incorporated into the end stages of implementation, rather than early in design exercises. This statement rings true for traditional GUI-based software development, and rings even truer for the handful of voice technology providers that have attempted to create globalized solutions. Fortunately, we are at an early enough phase in the adoption and development of voice technology to begin taking proactive steps towards creating a more consistent and coherent vision of globalizing voice applications.

• Bringing Globalization to Every Solution, Xiao Hui Zhu, IBM China
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  As the Internet increasingly drives the economy, today’s market is rapidly becoming more and more geared toward multinational participation and international transactions. One challenge in this is that globalization is not something that can simply be added to existing applications. Globalization permeates so many areas in a solution’s development that it must be taken into consideration from the very beginning of the development cycle.

• Globalization: Resistance is Futile, Dr. Mark Davis, IBM Corporation
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  The keynote presentation from the 2003 LISA Global Strategies Summit in San Francisco, this paper explores the technology and business of globalization.

• Localization in Poland: A Market Primer, Argos Company
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  Even to a layperson it is clear that there are huge opportunities in the localization of websites or software to suit the needs of the local market. With only one in four people in the world speaking English, and with more and more people accessing the Internet and becoming “potential clients”, the localization of products and content to local languages and customs becomes a completely obvious move for companies going global. The success of companies competing with each other will ultimately depend on how well they are able to sell to local consumers or end clients, and this in turn will depend on how well their content or, in the case of software companies, their systems, are localized.

• The Culture of Translation in Poland, Argos Company
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  Anyone who is in the translation and localization business knows that this is a hard service to provide. Let’s face it; we are in a tough business. There are so many things that can go wrong during a project, so many variables, and then at the end of the day, the quality of what we produce is often subjective. Still, professional companies persevere and the key to success is an absolute obsession with perfection, quality, and outstanding customer service. Let’s first take a look at what makes a really great translation and then we can analyze the particular situation in Poland.

• When to Use Machine Translation, Lionbridge
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  Commercial interest in machine translation (MT) is experiencing a significant rebound, even though the quality of MT output has not dramatically improved in recent years. This paper explains how factors increasing the utility and applicability of MT have opened the door for market adoption.

• When to Automate Translation Processes, Lionbridge
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  In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about workflow automation in translation environments. But workflow is just one of several areas where automation can reduce costs and improve service. In many cases, automating these other areas will garner greater results than workflow. Additionally, there are still many translation projects where automation is not appropriate — where automation does not achieve sufficient reduction in variable costs to justify the fixed costs of implementation.

• Language Technology in Agribusiness Manufacturing, Merrill Brink
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  Think Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Andy Grove and Steve Jobs. Add Cyrus McCormick, John Deere and Benjamin Holt. Cyrus McCormick? John Deere? Benjamin Holt? What do the inventors of the mechanical harvester, the moldboard plow and the tracked tractor have in common with the aforementioned high-tech crowd at Microsoft, Oracle, Intel and Apple respectively? Quite a bit, actually. Each developed a labor-saving device that was immediately accepted in world markets. In addition, as each company began selling to world markets, it developed translation technology and business processes that had applications far beyond its immediate industry.