Global players, global documentation needs

Telecommunications today is a big and booming business. All significant players have revenues in excess of USD $15 billion, and growth rates among the front-runners are at least 15% year. Nortel itself is a 17 billion dollar company with 75,000 employees, and sells products in over 100 countries, competing against companies like Lucent, Alcatel, Siemens and, more recently, Cisco. The company's five lines of business are growing, fueled by the global trend towards deregulation and explosive new technologies such as cellular wireless and the Web.

Servicing this network products business requires large volumes of documentation in multiple languages. At Nortel, ten major authoring sites worldwide employ 800-1,000 authors, with input being received 24 hours a day. The biggest suite of documents comprises 125,000 pages, while one individual document is 30,000 pages long and half a dozen are over 10,000 pages long. Accordingly, over the last few years, 60% of translation expenditures have been directed towards product information, 20% of dollars went on product localization, 5% on corporate information, and 15% on regional information published abroad. Information is distributed in electronic form (CDs and Web) and in print for on-site access and cases where malfunctions make it impossible to dial into the network. Over 1,200 titles are currently published, with over 250,000 CD replications a year.

The general content and the presentation format of technical documentation are often standardized (e.g. via the US Bellcore standards), due to the implications of failure. If a switch goes down, there is no dial tone-and hence no fire services and no police. In addition, national security may be affected and there are no business transactions taking place. After the event, there is a big investigation to discover why it had happened and how to prevent it recurring. This is why Nortel and other manufacturers have extensive technical verification programs. Nevertheless, statistics for the industry as a whole indicate that 13% of regular outages and 42% of procedural error outages are caused by documentation problems.

In addition, the information consumer audience is changing, and this is impacting the information content. The source English content has to be simplified to be effective. Craftsperson skills are declining due to the rapid growth of the industry, and service staff do not have time to attend vendor courses, but are relying more on self-help training courses and documentation.

Translation is now expected in foreign markets. Expediency matters. For example, 61% of revenues at Bay Networks (Nortel's new acquisition) comes from products that did not exist 12 months ago. The impact can have revenue implications.

Information therefore has to be simpler - both to enable it to be understood and to make it more easily and rapidly translated. Our estimates are that it would cost any company around USD $700-1,000 to create and initially translate one page of documentation into six languages. Our objective was to reduce initial translation and update translation costs by 50%.

A five-star solution

These five components were designed to achieve better, simpler writing, the standardized use of terms, lower translation and distribution costs and quality discipline. In addition, we had to meet a financial target: reduce the translation cost-for six languages and not the three we had originally aimed to tackle at once. These six languages in which translations from English need to be made are Japanese, Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and German.

The solution we put together consists of five components:

• Nortel Standard English (NSE),
• a global terminology management system,
• computer-assisted translation,
• foreign language electronic delivery, and
• a quality program.

Nortel Standard English

The first component of our solution was to introduce a controlled English writing standard - i.e. a terminology glossary and writing guidelines. We distilled fifteen rules designed to optimize clarity, terminology use and translatability from the 35-rule AECMA controlled language set, developed for the airline industry. These were implemented with a supporting authoring application that highlighted with color-coding any non-conforming content or terms. A scoring system is used to ensure document compliance when completed.

The software development tool we use is Smartcom's MAXit, which was customized to provide multiplatform software support (our authors work on a mixture of Interleaf and Frame, running on Macs, PCs, HP and Unix platforms). The information produced by the authors is targeted to conform at a 95%+ scoring level. One thing that helped here was the fact that Nortel has a tradition of writing standards going back to 1986/87, plus the fact that controlled English is now a corporate program thanks to senior management support. Even so, you also need to convince people at grass roots level that the supposed restrictions in their creativity are necessary in order to increase precision and hence avoid equipment failures.

Industrial-strength terminology - Jerome

The second component of the program we developed consists of a global terminology management database. Terminology support is absolutely crucial to the success of the program: new concepts are formed as the many new products are developed and have to be standardized and documented rapidly to ensure efficient work. This is why we looked for a heavy-duty terminology vehicle that could not only store the data but also allow English authors and translators to submit terms and receive approval quickly. In addition, approved terms have to be disseminated fast to authors and other translation units around the world. Our goal was to turn terms round in three days or less, and export them to region translation memory and machine translation tools within five days.

The solution we came up with is a customized Oracle technology called Jerome. Authors and designers submit suggestions for English terms to it: this automatically triggers a check for conflicts with existing terms in Nortel Standard English and a review by experts in the field as regards necessity and accuracy. After this, a decision to accept or reject the terms is made. After final approval and syntactic coding, terms are added to the approved dictionary overnight and are then available to all users worldwide.

In the next stage, the foreign-language equivalents are created. External vendors make suggestions which are then approved internally (controlled terminology - as opposed to controlled language - is used for all of the languages, not just English). In-country reviewers then review the suggested translations and either accept them or provide reasons for rejection, in which case the term is retranslated. An interface within the term base allows terminologists throughout the world to report problems 24 hours a day. Once a problem is reported, its status is displayed, with a history file for each term providing information on any changes made, and the reasons for them.

Jerome currently contains 14,000 general lexicon terms, and we are now building the equivalents in the six languages we are working in. New terms are added at a rate of 50% a year, with a new line of business already accounting for 7,500 in 1999.

Lower translation costs through computer-assisted translations

The third step in the process is translation, which is based around the Trados translation memory plus several MT tools for the various different languages. Work here is split between a centralized function and local vendors. The role of the former is core end-to-end process and quality responsibility, the global vendor relations program, coordinating the terminology management and update process, and centralized TM functions. In other words, we take the English documentation, preprocess it and break those parts of it that actually need translating out for multiple languages.

Our regional units work with the local language services vendors to provide project management and quality programs/metrics, and update the terminology. The local Nortel units also refine the translation tools over time. With the use of controlled English on the source text and target terminology investment, we targeted more than 80% translation accuracy before post-editing. The local vendors perform the final edit and clean up of processed work, with quality checks subsequently being performed in the local regions to ensure style and accuracy.

We partner with the language vendors directly to ensure consistency in pricing and quotations, tools training, and familiarity with Nortel products. In addition to these local relationships, we have created partnerships with the Nortel business units (i.e. the writing community) to ensure we get their input and buy-in, and forecasts.

Foreign-language electronic delivery

After translation and quality assurance, the documentation is then passed on for Electronic Document Delivery (EDD). The primary thrust here is toward centralized integrated Web self-service applications, which represent substantial cost savings and facilitate the changing user requirements mentioned earlier. However, some customers also require distribution to their own local Web servers as back-ups, as well as print versions and CDs. Others request actual source documents to load on to their unique EDD systems. The product solution we provide is Helmsman 4.x, which supports distribution of all the foreign languages in which we work. Either SGML or Adobe Acrobat PDF formats can be used for document inputs. In future, SGML "mix and match" "delivery" featuring the SoftQuad Panorama browser will be used. We support both Internet and custom clients.

Quality everywhere

Underpinning all these other activities is a quality program. Everything that we do is written up in ISO. In 1998, we achieved a national competition-level criteria assessment using the Malcolm Baldridge management philosophy. This involved determining our key business drivers, process alignment, metrics, obtaining good results, and doing competitive benchmarking. The results are a good baseline for continuous improvement.

Result and conclusions

Designing and implementing a project is like building a house: two people starting with two pieces of land and different requirements will produce different results. We followed in the tracks of others such as Caterpillar, Microsoft, IBM, Xerox and General Motors. The results have been impressive - we are cutting costs and delivery times in half, although when we reach this point for a specific language depends on the volumes involved and the experience curve, and therefore varies. We use three hard metrics for measuring ROI-cost per page, interval and quality, plus a set of in-process metrics and end result metrics. Of course, this is not an exact science, and it is not as easy to score as we would like, but we are getting the results.

Having said this, we learned a number of lessons from the project, which we would like to share with others:

• Having a baseline writing and graphics standard is crucial.
• Controlled writing takes some getting used to by writers and translators. The issue at hand with regards to style was whether the documentation and the translation was accurate, and whether a service person could therefore do their job.
• We had been told that the terminology work would be time-consuming and very expensive - in fact it was even more so.
• The systems integration work involved was greater than expected, although the tools manufacturers have evolved steadily over the last two years.
• Last but not least, it was ambitious of us to try to do six languages at once. This resulted in a number of unique local process issues-e.g., for Japanese vs. Portuguese. The global translation vendors were not as far along in technology familiarity as we had hoped. Also, the scale and scope of this project were such that it took a fairly large team to deploy such a comprehensive program.

As a final observation from deploying a large translation technology program such as this, I am surprised that there are not more vertical market collaborative initiatives in any industries to advance translation/localization solutions. The benefits of such solutions are volume-driven and today only a few of the largest companies can approach achieving the full benefits of a robust program in a handful of languages. It makes sense to me that a translator who does legal work on day one, medical work on day two, and telecoms on day three cannot be as efficient as an individual with in-depth industry and product knowledge working day in and day out with consistent terminology, tools and processes.

The pace of Global Commerce is accelerating. The value to global customers of having better, faster, cheaper language solutions is obvious.

I come from a background where I have seen successful collaboration in our industry in areas such as Technical Standards, and Electronic Data Interchange. I have worked with airline industry participants in SITA who collaborated to standardize maintenance information and build a communications network and put processes in place to handle ticketing and baggage issues.

I would like to suggest that LISA and other existing vertical market industry forums have the potential to spawn such vertical market initiatives as a next logical step in our evolution. I would be pleased to participate in further discussions in this area.

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Ed Deveau
Nortel Networks
Director, Customer Information Services
200 Athens Way
Nashville TN 37228
USA
Tel.: +1-615-734-4692
Fax: +1-615-734-4970
E-mail: eddeveau@nortelnetworks.com