The Annual LISA Forum Europe

LISA Industry Introduction Session

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

Welcome and Introductions

Program Overview & Day One Objectives

KEYNOTE: Responding to Today’s Global Challenge – Globalization’s Key Business and Political Mandates

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

Eden and Holland will provide perspectives and best practices from two leading edge corporations for implementing scalable solutions that can gracefully respond to organizational growth, change and diversity. As Oracle has progressed through more than 35 acquisitions over the past three years, its workforce has almost doubled from 35,000 to 66,500 employees. As it continues to grow, its Knowledge Management strategy is evolving to meet the needs of a business that operates globally through regionally aligned practices. 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.

13:30-14:00
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.”
14:00-14:45
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.
14:45-15:30
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.

13:30-14:00
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.
14:00-15:30
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.

13:30-14:00
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.
14:00-14:30
Optimizing 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, R&D, and working with customers have gone into the development of LTC Worx.
14:30-15:00
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.
15:00-15:30
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.

PANEL DISCUSSION: REGULATORY ISSUES IN THE LOCALIZATION INDUSTRY

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.

Day One Summary • Program Overview

A Globalization Case Study – How to Measure in Korean

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 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

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-Basic as another terminology format, will also be presented briefly.

“Think Globally, Act Locally”: Business Process Integration for Multi-Subsidiary Organizations

Complex global organizations with several subsidiaries often allude to their intention to "think globally and act locally," as a way to streamline operations and to optimize the achievement of organizational goals. Nevertheless, the fulfillment of this goal usually poses a set of important challenges and questions based on the diversity in operational characteristics and goals of each subsidiary. Wasser will confront these challenges by defining the main principles for managing multi-subsidiary content. In addition, he will present best practices and a set of recommended tools for collaborative integration of global business processes.

Automating the Localization Process

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.

13:30-14:30
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 • Simon Otter - Group Technology Manager, 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.
14:30-15:00
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.
15:00-15:30
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!

13:30-15:00
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
15:00-15:30
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.

13:30-14:00
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.
14:00-14:30
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.
14:30-15:00
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.
15:00-15:30
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.

PANEL DISCUSSION: Why Terminology is Gaining So Much Attention in Today’s Global Business Community

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.

Wrap-up and Adjourn