This real-life anecdote from one of our customers illustrates the pain organizations are going through when creating a global online presence. Even worse, with more than 90 per cent of the Internet’s websites still in English, many organizations are not yet aware that to sell a product, or persuade an audience, you must speak the language of your target group.

As you are probably aware, statistics provide ample proof of the user retention and additional sales achieved by localizing your website. Localizing websites is money in the bank then, for organizations that choose to capture the potential market.

Rising to the Challenge

So, if there is money to be made, why don’t all organizations have great localized websites yet? Well, as the anecdote illustrates, creating a global online presence is not a trivial task, and there are many hurdles that organizations must leap to do so.

This article outlines some of the challenges that your organization will face when localizing the corporate website. Furthermore, it will show you how Tridion DialogServer uses the concepts of BluePrint Management and workflow to create a solution that facilitates a localized, multilingual website.

The goals

So what are exactly the issues your organization must address when localizing a website? We will take a brief look at:

• brand management
• central versus local administration
• translation and localization management
• the content life cycle

Brand Management

Often, first attempts at globalization result in locally created web sites that look completely different from the central website. Just take a look at the local websites (.nl, .de, .fr or .com domains) of some European (Italian or French) car manufacturers to see some striking examples.

Clearly, the challenge for organizations is to devise a website structure that both acknowledges local cultural differences and maintains the coherence of the corporate or brand image.

Central versus local administration

While corporate brand should be administered centrally, no one knows the local audience better than your local people. So, webmasters should be able to control centrally managed elements of a website, while allowing local offices to address the needs of their local customers by providing tailored content.

Translation and Localization Management

Another challenge to website localization lies in translation itself and its associated cost. Your organization must decide if it is worthwhile to translate a particular piece of content. If the content is not translated, you might want to offer your visitors an alternative language without having to leave your localized website.

Also, translated content can be reused in multiple countries. For example, a French translation can be used in France and in Canada. However, this may not eliminate the need or desire to present localized content that addresses cultural differences.

With online communication steadily increasing in amount and speed of change, the operational cost of localized websites far exceeds costs of the initial implementation and software licenses. As a result, structuring the translation work and being able to influence it is crucial to a cost effective process.

Content life cycle

While some content can wait for translation, time-critical and important information, such as press releases, may need to be published in multiple languages simultaneously. In general, the life cycle—content creation, updates, publishing, deleting etc.—of content and its related translations and localizations should be somehow synchronized but still allow for some flexibility.

What is needed?

In view of the factors outlined above, it is clear that your organization needs an efficient and manageable process to manage the array of rapidly changing content in multiple languages and locales while maintaining consistent brand management. Considering the cost and frequency, this process should be as structured and automated as possible, while offering enough flexibility to easily adapt to changing needs.

To support this process in a genuinely efficient and effective way, the best solution is to opt for an architecture that draws a distinction between those elements of content and layout that are “global” and those that are “local”. This is only possible by using an enterprise-wide web Content Management System.

BluePrint Management

BluePrint Management is the concept used by Tridion DialogServer to accommodate for all these needs. BluePrint Management has the following three key elements:

• separation of content, layout, pages and website structure
• sharing of these items across multiple publications
• creation of local copies of shared items

Separation of content, layout, pages and website structure

BluePrint Management is based on the separation of content, layout, pages and web site structure into different building blocks. These building blocks are portable and re-usable within your organization. Individual pieces of content, layout, pages and web site structure can be combined in various ways and facilitate an easy assembly and deployment of websites and online portals.

Just think of the anecdote at the start of this article: the French subsidiary could have provided the translated website in some layout independent format such as XML, rather than HTML. And the corporate website could have used a Content Management System that imported that translated XML and assembled it reusing the new graphic design templates. In that case, the separation of content and layout would have allowed the translated website with the new graphic design to be deployed within a day.

Figure 1. BluePrint Hierarchy

Sharing of items across publications

Within BluePrint Management, building blocks are organized in entities with their own context, called Publications. The building blocks of a publication can be shared to other publications, thus establishing a parent/child relationship between publications. The parent/child relationship between publications enables the reuse of building blocks in another context.

Figure 1 depicts a central BluePrint publication (parent) that is shared to several local publications (children). This constellation of publications is referred to as a BluePrint Hierarchy.

Creation of Local Copies

Child publications in a BluePrint Hierarchy can contain a combination of:

• shared items—these items are shared from a parent publications and are thus read-only (grey in the picture)
• local copies of shared items—editable copies of the shared items created by localizing items of one or more parent publications. Localizing is the process of creating a local copy of a shared item. (blue in the picture)
• local items—items that only exist in the child publication but not in the parent. (the blue local building blocks in the picture)

Shared items, local copies and local items can be used together in a publication. For example, a shared page can easily host a local copy of a piece of content. This means that just by creating local copies and translating content, a translated website instantly is available—with the same structure, pages and layout.

Apart from the translation, no skills or actions required! Likewise, if a page needs to be localized to host a local article, any non-localized items will automatically fall back on shared items of the parent. Again, no effort required!

So rather than only creating a translated version of a website, a relation is maintained between the parent and child publication. By maintaining the relation between the original piece of content and its translated or localized versions, the Content Management System can manage these together. Even though original and local copy are distinct items, their life cycle is intrinsically tied together.

BluePrint Scenarios

Depending on the needs of your organization, each of the building blocks within a BluePrint Hierarchy (content, layout, pages and web site structure) can be either managed on a central level (and reused and/or localized on a local level) or on a local level. Of course, a BluePrint Hierarchy will have to be carefully designed to provide for the needs of your organization.

In addition to translation and localization management, BluePrint Management can be used in different scenarios, with different goals in mind—such as Brand Management or Multi-channel publishing. However, this article describes BluePrint Management in the context of a localized, multilingual website.

Localized, multilingual website

To get a better feeling of how BluePrint Management can be used, we will design a hierarchy for a company with a presence in 80 countries. The company has a strong brand and wants that brand to be the same in all 80 countries. It has decided that it will have a separate website for 75 of the 80 countries.

After analyzing the languages used in those 75 countries, the company has decided to translate into 15 different languages. The translation work will be outsourced to a localization vendor.

While business results in some countries justify localization, other countries will use mere translations or partial translations of the content, and fall back to another language for the rest. Some of the centrally managed content is updated regularly —such as product data and press releases— and must be translated quickly. Some of the local offices will also contribute local articles.

The proposed solution

To address these issues, a three level BluePrint Hierarchy is designed:

1. First level, parent publication—the parent publication contains the website structure, layout templates, pages and content that will be present on all local websites. All content is in English, which is the corporate language.
2. Second level, child publications—15 publications that act as language repositories. These publications are child publications from the first level publication, and contain only shared items and local copies. A local copy is created for all content that needs to be translated, but pages, layout and structure are shared.
3. Third level, child publications—75 publications for each targeted country. Since multiple languages can be used within one country, publications at this level can have more than one parent. These publications contain shared items from both the first level and the second level (the local copies that in their turn are shared again).

The third level publications contain the published pages, that is, the pages that are seen by visitors of the website. Therefore, these publications are targeted at a specific group of visitors, taking into account any country, culture or locale specific needs. According to those needs, the local publications can assemble a website using the building blocks offered by the higher levels.

Figure 2. Multilingual, localized websites

Figure 2 shows part of the resulting BluePrint Hierarchy. As you can see, various grades of translation and localization are applied. Portugal is a small market, so the Portuguese site uses translated content only. In contrast, the Brazil site has localized content, structure and pages, and also adds its own content and pages.

For both the Portuguese and Brazil sites, Spanish is defined as a fallback language (indicated by the 1 and 2). English content is shown only when neither a Portuguese or Spanish translation is available.

Canada, a bilingual country, has two sites, one in English and one in French. The Canadian French website will first fall back to French if a localization is not available. It will fall back to English if a French translation is not available either. Both sites also have localized some content and pages and add their own content and pages.

The production cycle

The one thing missing in our story is some form of a process. An established process could have coordinated the efforts of the French subsidiary and the corporate office from our anecdote, thus preventing the loss of time and business opportunities (and morale).

In the localized multilingual website example, a staggering 91 different publications and their mutual relations need to be managed. Without some form of an automated process this is an impossible task.

Workflow

An automated workflow can tie the different levels together.

All items that are shared and need to be translated or localized are handled within a workflow process. Using a mix of manual and automatic workflow activities, content goes through a process of, for example, “creation”, “spell-checking”, ”review” and “translation”. Both user input and meta data (for example the type of content: weather report, press release or background article) can be used to route pieces of content through the required activities.

For example, the weather report might be routed through a machine translation, the press release goes to the localization vendor to be translated within two days and the background article is translated for a lower fee in two weeks.

Localization vendor integration

In the case of the localized, multilingual website, content is created or modified in the level one Parent Publication. The 15 level two language repositories should be filled as easily as possible. The “translation” activity in the Parent Publication workflow process automatically creates local copies in all 15 language repositories, which prompts a new workflow process in those language repositories.

That second workflow process extracts the content and sends it to the localization vendor. Localization vendors as Bowne Global Solutions or ALPNET have web-based translation services that allow customers to submit and retrieve translation jobs over HTTP.

By using XML as the underlying storage format:

• the content can easily be extracted from the Content Management System and sent to the localization vendor
• XSLT can be used to transform the XML to the format used by a specific localization vendor
• additional data, such as source and target languages, can be added to the XML, thereby providing the localization vendor with all relevant information
• the translated content can be retrieved through HTTP, and the translated content inserted in the local copies of the level two language repositories.

Workflow integration

The workflow processes described in the previous paragraph applies to the Content Management System workflow only. However, (web) content management is rapidly evolving into an inseparable part of other business processes. For example, the production of quarterly results is a business process, and the publishing of those results on your website are an intrinsic part of that business process.

Therefore, a workflow process must include both content management activities and other business activities. Rather than providing its own, proprietary and confined workflow, a Content Management System must integrate with existing enterprise-wide workflow systems. Even though widely accepted workflow standards are not available, the Content Management System must provide a workflow architecture that enables seamless integration of content management activities within existing business processes, while optimally leveraging existing workflow infrastructure and functionality.

In the case of localization vendor integration, the content management workflow and the translation vendor workflow are integrated into one logical process. Pierre Cadieux has developed an excellent generic model on web site globalization (see http://www.i18n.ca/publications/WGTmodel.htm) which was described in the October/November 2000 issue of MultiLingual Computing & Technology. This model describes the complete translation/localization process and its related workflow, both for the content management part and the translation vendor part.

Combined with the workflow integration and BluePrint Management described above, a very complete solution for website globalization can be made.

Change notification

To go back one more time to the localized, multilingual website sample, the 75 country sites are managed by the local offices. The local offices need to know when existing content is modified at the higher levels, so they can judge if further localization work is needed. Since the localization cannot be automated, the level two workflow sends an email to the level three webmasters. This email will only contain a reference to the new article, or a comparison of the original and modified content if a change occurred.

The right tools and technologies

Using the right technologies and methods, it is quite feasible to operate a multilingual website in a highly efficient and effective way. As I have illustrated, you certainly need an enterprise-wide, language-aware Content Management System such as Tridion DialogServer.

It is also necessary to invest in defining the business requirements, the subsequent BluePrint Hierarchy, and workflow processes for a globalized website. However, in light of the operational costs of maintaining a multilingual website, this is a very cost effective investment that will help your company thrive in the global marketplace.

About the author

Otto de Graaf is Product Manager with Tridion. Tridion (www.tridion.com) is a leading European provider of advanced XML-based web content management software. Tridion’s core product, Tridion DialogServer, allows for the consistent, timely and cost-effective exchange of strategic content across a constellation of multi-language websites and devices. Amongst other things, Otto works on the strategy for BluePrint Management, localization support and workflow, and the delivery of this strategy into the product. Although he has a background in linguistics (Masters degree in Latin American Languages and Cultures) he has been working in the IT industry for the last 8 years. He can be reached at Otto.deGraaf@tridion.com.