It is time to rescue our content!

George Kondrach, Executive Vice President of Innodata Isogen, and a recognized expert on the content supply chain management and its economics, opened this year’s Summit by challenging the audience to not only think outside of the box, but to throw the box away as we attempt to build knowledge-centric systems. He declared that it is time to rescue our content from the old metaphor of platforms, files, pages and devices since the latter are limiting us as we struggle to move forward to create, produce and distribute our knowledge in ways that are truly useful. He made a convincing case that our current mindset is limiting us in our attempts to improve our information processing systems.

The scope of the solution must fit the scale of the problem.

The scope of the solution must fit the scale of the problem. Kondrach pointed out that most solutions are designed for the mass market. Part of choosing a solution with the right scope is not succumbing to the rhetorical marketing devices. We must concentrate on the problem and allow it to show through. This is made more difficult by the fact that we have created and now live in a consumer society in which decisions are based on things that are really not differences at all. For more information on how to make XML work for you and how to avoid common problems, please read Making XML Work for You.

Disruptive technologies are boring… that’s their secret.

Igor Jablokov, Program Director for Mutimodal Initiatives at IBM and Chairman of the Board of the XMLForum, explained that he has a very simple message when he visits companies such as Sony and Nokia: You will go out of business in a few years if you don’t wake up to your blind spot. And the blind spot? What we build must meld into the background. As Andy Grove says, “Disruptive technologies are boring… and that’s their secret.” This is because users want data/services access anytime/anyplace and don’t care what carrier, device or operating system is involved. In order to create and produce all of the “latest, cool stuff,” there is no choice except to adopt standards.

Tired of synching your TMs? Check out xml:tm.

A great example of thinking outside of the box that does away with the need to synch translation memories is Andrzej Zydron’s xml:tm (tm for text memory) namespace format. xml:tm is an ontology of textual content, and is totally transparent. It has been proposed to LISA as a standard, and is based on standards throughout. It mandates SRX (Segmentation Rules eXchange) for segmentation and was designed with TMX-compatibility in mind. It is also very simple, consisting of only five elements. xml:tm turns TM on its head, and puts it in the document itself. When TM is stored in the document itself, there is no need to lose data, and translation can be carried out easily on the web or in other environments. Check it out! For taking TM beyond the boundaries of terminology, please read Getting More From Translation Memory.

You will be out of business if you don’t follow standards.

Dr. Alan K. Melby, Director of the BYU Translation Research Group, a member of the OSCAR Steering Committee, ATA Board Member and President of LTAC Global, continued to make the case for adopting standards. According to Dr. Melby, the bottom line is that you will be out of business if you don’t follow standards. Everyone truly benefits when standards are used because they (1) level the playing field for tools vendors; (2) open the market to qualified providers and (3) allow problems to be avoided, or at least traced and corrected. If standards are not perfect, the solution is to work together to fix them, not abandon them.

We are far from being able to support the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

Gudrun Magnusdottir, Managing Director of ESTeam, described how far we are from being able to effectively and efficiently support global events such as the Beijing 2008 Olympics. She also outlined the tremendous efforts being made by the Chinese and the Europeans to meet this huge need. Melby introduced the new GEvTerm (Global Events Terminology) Project which needs volunteers and is attempting to support language services for global events, such as the Olympics, in non-English-speaking host cities.

Cisco relaunched 23 sites in less than three months.

Savitha Varadan, Manager for Global Web Content at PeopleSoft described how implementing the right technology from SDL at the right time has made all of the difference in being able to relaunch 23 international sites in less than three months. To PeopleSoft’s credit, it took the time to think through what it actually wanted to accomplish internationally and then developed a set of best practices for redoing its international sites. For more details on how PeopleSoft were so successful, read Building an On-demand Global Content Management System.

Applying the right technology at the right time makes all the difference.

Peter Jaeger, Enterprise Architecture at Cisco, detailed how his company deployed machine translation (MT) very successfully to raise the percentage of users accessing the web to resolve their technical support issues in China, Japan and Korea. Again, the right technology (this time from Systran) applied at the right time to solve a defined problem.

India is an inescapable part of today’s global strategy.

Jessica Roland, Group Product Manager, International Product Operations at Documentum, shared how far her company has come along the offshore outsourcing path with India. She described the challenges in adapting the model to localization while striving for cost-effective scalability. Roland pointed out that India is an inescapable part of today’s global strategy, at least until it becomes too expensive, and companies are forced to move onto a less-expensive region. For a discussion of Global Content Management vis-à-vis content, please read Globalization Is Here!

OSCAR made a lot of progress during this Summit.

OSCAR (Open Standards for Container/Content Allowing Re-use) made a lot of progress during this Summit through its visioning exercise and Steering Committee Meeting. These meetings initiated the process of identifying the pain points that companies face in their globalization activities. The next step will be to prioritize the issues and then begin work to resolve them. Andrzej Zydron also reported on the GILT Metrics proposal that provides for both word and character counts to independently verify the amount of information to be localized. For more details on the proposal, please read GILT Metrics – Slaying the Word Count Dragon.

Don’t wait for the next silver bullet.

In opening the second day of the Summit, Subhas Palchowdhury, Program Director for Globalization Application, Process and Tools at IBM, encouraged the audience not to wait for the next silver bullet, but to focus on innovation in addition to invention. He reminded us that no idea is too small since the sum of returns from many small changes can amount to much more than the return from one big change. He prodded us to think of translation and its process as an enabler to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace and not to forget that true success always lies in the execution of whatever strategy is chosen.

Applying innovation, rather than invention, can yield big returns.

Bonnie Bonomé, Globalization Project Manager, and Lum Twilligear, Localization Engineering Lead at IBM/Tivoli Systems, described the key background concepts and locally developed tools that have helped them to realize localization project cost reductions averaging 10-15% per year for several years running. They meticulously studied and analyzed their processes and applied innovation at every step to improve their workflow, and it has paid off beautifully. For more details on exactly how IBM went about this process, please read Don’t Just Do It! Automate It.

Your content supply chain is only as strong as your weakest link.

Bryan Schnabel, Information Architect at Tektronix and member of the XLIFF Committee within OASIS and LISA’s OSCAR Steering Committee, is another person who has applied innovation to the publishing process to allow his company to stay ahead of the game and reduce its costs substantially. Through adopting XML, Tektronix has future-proofed its data, its most strategic resource. As Mike Dillinger, Translation Technology Consultant for Venturi Technology Partners, pointed out during the Language Technology Review Panel, Your content supply chain is only as strong as your weakest link.

Collaborative outsourcing gets you want you want.

Leonid Glazytchev, General Manager at Logrus International, Gabriela Bosco, General Manager at Pampa Translations and Alexei Miller, Director of Project Management for DataArt, provided their unique perspectives on offshore outsourcing and how to go about making the right choices. Glazytchev pointed out that outsourcing for software development and localization is not the same thing since the processes are actually quite different. Today’s outsourcing choices depend on factors such as qualified resources, compatible mentalities, innovation, etc., rather than just pricing, since most services are priced at relatively the same level these days, regardless of location. Miller explained why outsourcing for small- and medium-sized businesses is different than for large enterprises. As the saying goes, traditional outsourcing gets you what you pay for, collaborative outsourcing gets you want you want. For insights into how to choose an appropriate localization outsourcing model, read Choosing a Localization Model: What Really Counts?.

The auto industry is further ahead than IT with their CMS implementations in some ways.

There are other industry sectors, such as the automotive sector, that are farther ahead than high-tech in some ways with their CMS implementations. At the same time, neither Translation memory (TM) nor standards such as TMX (Terminology eXchange) are established yet in the auto industry. It is important for LISA to reach outside of the high-tech industry as it continues to develop language standards. Hanspeter Siegrist, a member LISA’s Advisory Board, and Rick Woyde, President and CEO of the Detroit Translation Bureau, moderated a discussion on the automotive industry that highlighted the fragmentation within that industry and ways that LISA might be able to help. For an overview on how GM successfully implemented J2450 to do the impossible, please read Mission Impossible: Improve Quality, Time and Speed at the Same Time.

Throw away the box!

There were many other excellent presentations, case studies and workshops on topics such as XML and localization, translation quality, localization project management, defining globalization requirements, cost-effective design for multilingual documentation, creating multilingual web sites, automating localization workflow and effective MT solutions that space does not allow us to cover here. Please contact lisa@lisa.org to find out how to access the presentation slides if you are not a LISA member. And remember… “think outside of the box” and even throw it away, if necessary.