As our readers in the northern hemisphere enjoy their vacations in an effort to clean out the cobwebs in their brains for a fresh start in the fall, our readers in the southern hemisphere are heading into springtime soon, which will offer them the opportunity for “spring cleaning” to deal with those same cobwebs. For those readers who live in the equatorial regions, rains and storms are on the way to accomplish the same for them.

Brushing away the cobwebs usually means assessing where we have been and what we have accomplished during the past several months, in preparation for doing a bit of planning for the next few months. It is a great time to explore once again the opportunities for applying creativity to where language meets business. This may take the form of divergent creative thinking (the intellectual ability to think of many original, diverse, and elaborate ideas) and/or convergent creative thinking (the intellectual ability to logically evaluate, critique and choose the best idea from a selection of ideas) (taken from Definitions of creativity).

One way to stimulate creative thinking is to run a brainstorming session with a small group of people to come up with a solution(s) to a problem that has been bugging your organization for a long time. Here are some pointers to ensure results:

1. Focus on one problem or issue. If the brainstorming participants need to prepare a bit prior to the session, communicate this beforehand.
2. Ensure that someone is chosen as a facilitator (a) to keep the group rolling and expressing itself, and (b) at the same time, to keep it on-track enough so that something is accomplished.
3. Start with a small group of people (a good number is three to five) so that the participants feel freer to express themselves.
4. Ensure that the environment where you meet is comfortable and conducive to the informal exchange of ideas.
5. Have a white board and plenty of markers and paper. Assign someone to recording all of the ideas, no matter how crazy or far-fetched they may sound at the time.
6. Not everything has to be accomplished in one session. Feel free to schedule short sessions every few days.
7. Assign someone to the task of driving the refinement of the ideas after the brainstorming session ends so that momentum is not lost. This may be in preparation for the next session, or it may lead to implementation of one or more of the ideas as a solution to the original issue/problem.

Here are two good references to check out on brainstorming sessions and on creative thinking in general:

1. How to Run a Brainstorming Meeting by Scott Berkun, July 2004. This former Microsoft Program Manager outlines a concrete process for setting up and running successful brainstorming meetings, including followup.
2. Contentious. This blog provides eight rather unusual pieces to help your creative juices flow.

All of the contributors to this issue have seen the same problems as the rest of us, but have diligently explored interesting alternatives and combined previously uncombined elements to produce their solutions to problems that they face everyday where language intersects business.

Monika Röthlisberger, Group Manager for Language Technologies at CLS Communication puts a humorous spin on her company’s “adventure through the Machine Translation Jungle,” as she calls it, after customers challenged it to solve the problem of employees sending confidential texts out to free machine translation systems on the internet. The title for this article, Making Money with Machine Translation: Every Cash Cow Starts Out as a Calf! (premium), says it all.

One of LISA’s newest members, Language Intelligence, Ltd., took a different track when presented with the opportunity to implement machine translation to solve its client’s language technology business need. Dietmar Boie, Director of Operations, explains why his team chose to combine different elements to produce an integrated, rather than an MT-based, solution, in Integrating Content Management and Language Technology – An Alternative to MT (premium). Preliminary data indicate a very high rate of return with a comparatively small upfront investment.

As every person who has been involved in an MT implementation will tell you, the key to high-quality output is the quality of the source language. For those of you involved in the Japanese market, check out the Japan Technical Communicators Association (JTCA) 2004 Annual Meeting and Conference (Japanese only) in Tokyo in September. LISA will present a Localization Tutorial and Business Panel during the conference.

And, of course, high-quality source language is built on intelligently managed terminology. We strongly encourage you to participate in TM Survey 2004, being run by LISA/OSCAR. The goals of the survey are (1) to confirm the status of deployment of translation memory, (2) to understand the business value of translation memories and translation memory tools (in-house and off-the-shelf), (3) to determine how and the extent to which the OSCAR/TMX standard is being used and (4) to gauge the trends in these areas. The survey will run through the end of September, and the results will be available at no charge. Please click here to participate.

As many of the “old-timers” in the language industry will attest, we have often been too creative – coming up with new solutions to what have often been the same problems disguised in different forms. Therefore, to many of us, it is a relief that there are finally standards being created and implemented to rationalize this creativity and to harness and channel it in productive ways. Both customers and service providers should now have more time to be creative with new technology and with the related business processes. Of course, it is very hard work to create and implement standards as well (just ask any OSCAR member!), but at least when this work is done, the standards endure and are available to apply to future scenarios.

In our Focus on Standards column this month, a reprint of Using Translation Technology at Sun Microsystems (public), Tim Foster, an Engineer in Software Globalization, describes how his company is using open standards such as XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) and Translation Memory eXchange (TMX) format for translation on open source projects involving GNOME. He provides information on Sun’s new translation editor and presents the company’s vision of translation technology.

In our advertorial (public), Lauren Wood, Conference Chair for XML 2004, argues that XML (Extensible Markup Language) has moved from the “hype” stage to where the value of XML projects is generally recognized. The fact that XML has support for multiple languages built into it means that all XML-related technologies can be used in every natural language, regardless of the writing system it uses (as long as it can be expressed in Unicode). The XML 2004 conference in November, From Syntax to Solutions, is being produced by IDEAlliance and co-hosted by LISA.

Editor’s Note: For more information on how to apply XML to language technology issues, check out Andrzej Zydron’s Using XML Technology to Reduce the Cost of Authoring and Translation and Dan Dube’s Making XML Work for You.

There are many ways to stimulate one’s creative thinking, and “thinking outside of the box” is one of them. The crew from IBM Tivoli Software in Austin, Texas is back with the second installment (premium) in their Don’t Just Do It! Automate It series (the first article is available here). This time around, Bonnie Bonomé, Sushma Patel and Lum Twilligear explain the business rationale underlying their globalization tools and processes. Their process included smaller, incremental steps to achieving a very impressive 10 to 15% savings year over year during the last few years.

And for those of you who still doubt your ability to achieve the impossible, check out our interview with Kurt Ramin, one of LISA’s new Executive Advisory Board Members. When Ramin began his tenure as Commercial Director of the International Accounting Standards Committee Foundation (IASCF), he was told flat out by several translation service providers that his goal of translating his organization’s international accounting standards from English to German was impossible. Once again, our title says it all, Warning: Man With a Clear Vision on a Mission – Ramin ignored their rejections and went onto prove them wrong in a big way. The International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) are now accepted in more than ninety countries, and the European Union (EU) has passed a mandate for the use of these rules by all companies by 2005. Obviously, Ramin has plans for LISA as well!

Lest you forget, early registration has begun for LISA’s 50th international conference, the LISA Forum Europe, to be held in Paris from October 11-15. The theme will be Automating Global Business Process: Leading-Edge Strategies, Technologies and Standards. We are extremely proud and excited that Loïc Le Meur, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Europe, Middle East and Africa for Six Apart, will be our keynoter. Loïc, a well-known French entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Ublog, will be speaking on Localization for the Explosively Growing Startup. You can check out Loic’s blog in both French and English.

And last, but certainly not least, I want to follow up on an issue from one of my previous editorials. Back in June, we solicited readers to find out how your organizations give back to your local communities and/or to the world at large. I want to share with you the response from one of our Members, Michael Klinger, Globalization Division Manager at Venturi Technology Partners:

I loved this request. It is very relevant to people and businesses. The Globalization Division of Venturi Partners donates 1% of their commissions to international charities each year. Last year, we donated over $3000 to Amnesty International and Grassroots International. This year, we have chosen the Heifer Program. They donate domestic animals to towns worldwide. The villagers, in turn, donate the offspring of the animals to others in the village. We also volunteer monthly for different organizations around Boston – homeless shelters, tutoring English to immigrants etc.

Again, we are very interested at LISA in finding out how your organization “gives back” to your local community and/or to the world at large. Please write to us at letters@lisa.org so that we can share your humanitarian activities with the rest of our readers (and perhaps even spear/spur them onto action!).

Our brains are designed and built to solve problems – there is no special creative gene that identifies some people as being more creative than others (Scott Berkun).