Two LISA members framed the branding discussion well. Donald Barabé, VP of Operations at the Canadian Government Translation Bureau, reminded attendees that globalization is a reality, regardless of one’s political opinion. It’s not a trend, but a fact of life, and the issue is now how to tame it. According to Barabé, we have a final frontier to cross in erasing borders, and it’s languages.

As we struggle with the words to describe what we do, it really doesn’t matter whether we choose globalization or localization or a different word. However, according to Kim Harris, Managing Director of text&form Software-Lokalisierung GmbH, the branding does matter. It is our responsibility to brand whatever we choose and to support it actively as members. As Harris pointed out, the A in LISA stands for Association, so we must all participate, or it won’t work.

Loïc Le Meur, General Manager of Six Apart Ltd., the leader in the web blogging space with MovableType and TypePad, opened the Forum by describing his company’s attempts to create a business model to harness its explosive growth through opening and supporting new markets at a faster rate than companies usually do when expanding internationally. Unlike the content companies, Six Apart is revving its server-based source code (not its content, and that is a critical difference due to the testing requirements) once a month for one million users (with new users being added at the rate of 2000 per day!). The localization challenge is obvious. Blogging technology itself is helping the company to brand itself, as well as to reach out to find the resources it needs much faster than would normally be possible.

Blogs have become a great way to extend your brand and to make it more real. As Q Malandrino, Chairman and CEO of BrandLink Corporation, explained in his presentation, brands only exist in your customers’ heads. In other words, no one really owns his or her brand. With a blog, you are basically “open sourcing” the ideas in your head. A blog is the opposite of a personal web site that, for the most part, exists as an island on the web with no feedback or notification mechanism. However, since comment fields are possible on everything within a blog, all readers can jump in and comment. Blogs have come to be an interactive communication medium - a synthesis, if you will of the home page, the forum and the social networking site.

At the enterprise level, Michael Depner, Vice President for Globalization Services at SAP AG, challenged the audience to define globalization as LISA defines it, i.e., as a concept that addresses all of the enterprise challenges associated with transforming a company into one that is truly global. Based on this definition, the globalization of products and services requires the integration of all internal and external business functions, including marketing, sales, customer support, etc. throughout the world. To be successful at this, Depner believes that an organization must dedicate a function to globalization.

Both Le Meur and Depner discussed strategies for transforming their companies’ original products and brands to appeal to new audiences. Q Malandrino led a very interactive and lively panel discussion on branding and how LISA could spearhead the effort to bring the private and public sectors together to brand the entire language industry. A recurrent theme for our industry has been that we have failed to gain the respect and long-term attention of high-level management, whether on the client or the vendor side, whether in the private or public sector. At this point in our evolution, we need to agree within the industry how we want LISA to be perceived, and then move forward to brand the industry. We will then be able to clearly communicate and sell the value of what we do, up/down/across our own organizations and to the outside world.

Malandrino explained that branding is not about names or logos. Rather, it is a layer between you and your marketplace, one that translates your business strategy into terms that will be understood and valued by your intended audiences. In other words, branding is defining how your customer perceives the value of what you do. Nobody cares about what you do – they only care about what it does for them. This means that your brand is the perception, and that it resides in other people’s minds. In other words, as mentioned above, you do not own your brand. You can only try to influence it.

The challenge, as put forth by Charles Pau, Director for Globalization Architecture and Technology at IBM, is that both the public and private sectors must raise the awareness of the value that we bring – not because we are able to translate, but because we have incredible market knowledge that others can leverage to save them time and money.

Editor’s Note: The panel discussion following Malandrino’s presentation was extremely lively and valuable, involving many people in the audience. We encourage you to read the summary of the entire session.

There were several presentations during which clients described how they are managing the perception of their brands at the global level. Bruno Hermann, Web Content Manager for ACNielsen, outlined how his company has dramatically changed its external web face over the last eighteen months. In the process, localization has switched from being perceived as an option or as an afterthought to an added value. Before, localization was a budget burden; now, it’s a cost-efficient process based on a unified workflow, increasing revenues from content.

It about the same time that ACNielsen began to change its web face, senior European leaders at Citrix Systems stood up and said that the only thing they wanted was a globalized/localized web site due to the strain on their sales force. Trenton Cycholl, Director for Web and Business Intelligence, described how his company fixed the problem by educating itself on globalization issues and by finding the right partners to make a global web site implementation successful. Citrix faced the added challenge that the interaction between the web site and the CRM and SAP backends produced dynamic content that had to be taken into account. The company adopted what Cycholl called the “log mulcher approach,” through which it developed the ability to source once to a translated content repository and then publish to many sources (the web, marketing collateral, technical publications, training materials, etc.), along with the ability to add new languages frequently.

Chuck Wrobel, Internationalization Engineer at Avaya, told how he has been (successfully) waging a one-person campaign to enable his company to gain market share outside of the U.S. through proper internationalization best practice based on Unicode. The biggest challenge was to obtain buy-in from the many internal groups within Avaya itself. These teams often would not develop new technologies because of limitations in other teams, who often would not improve until the first team made the changes. Wrobel engaged local offices early on to prevent problems and to provide optimal support. If his efforts had had the support of a strong brand in back of him, his job would have been much easier.

Editor’s Note: For more background on what Chuck Wrobel presented, please read Why Is My Product Not Selling in Japan? and Is a Person’s Name Really Important?

Of course, it’s not just the private sector that faces a challenge due to the lack of branding for our industry. The European Union’s (EU’s) huge multilingual content production challenge dwarfs anything being faced by the private sector. The European Commission Directorate General for Translation is the largest translation service in the world with approximately 1,500 translators. It is responsible for producing 1.5 million pages (expected to rise to 2.5 million pages within less than two years) annually in twenty languages representing 380 possible language combinations.

The current budget for translation and interpretation at the EU Commission is € 1.1 billion (including both translation and interpretation) – approximately 1% of the total EU administrative budget, or approximately € 2.55 per citizen. According to Klaus Ahrend, Acting Head of Unit, Interinstitutional Relations and General Affairs, European Commission Directorate General for Translation (DGT), that doesn’t mean that multilingualism doesn’t have to be defended every so often. Branding the industry would be a big help in the areas of budgeting and recruitment. In the end, multilingualism costs, but there is an ROI, and it’s worth it. If multilingualism were not maintained, the EU could not function, according to Ahrend.

The Canadian Translation Bureau is the second largest translation service in the world with 1,200 translators, and it is now facing exactly the same challenge as the EU, though somewhat on a lesser scale. According to Barabé, the demand for translation services is increasing at the rate of 15-25% per year, while the supply of qualified translators continues to decline. It’s critical for Canada, where it faces a shortfall of 300 translators this year. Developing translator degree programs and branding are a part of the solution.

It’s not easy for the companies who provide services or technology to organizations such as the EU either. Pavel Skrivanek, Owner of Skrivanek Translation Services, described how she is very pleased to be working with the EU, but that her company faces constant challenges of huge workloads (more than a million words), extremely short turnaround times and a lack of access to the same technology as the EU to meet project deadlines.

To meet these huge challenges (language prioritization, the role of outsourcing, the tender process, recruitment, technology, terminology and QA), a combination of human resources, standards and technology are required. In one of the Forum’s most popular sessions, Philippe De Sainte Maresville, Worldwide Localization Center Director for Hewlett-Packard and Janaina Wittner, Senior Project Manager at WH&P, described how their two companies have built an integrated partnership that allows them to better balance the competing pressures for lower prices, time-to-market and quality.

Editor’s Note: For more information on exactly how to build this type of integrated partnership, please read The Key to Successful Outsourcing: Long-term Partnerships.

The panel on LISA’s Open Standards OSCAR Initiatives was based on contributions from Andrzej Zydron (CTO at XML International Ltd.), Daniel Benito (Director of Development at ATRIL Software) and David Pooley (Development Manager/Software Architect at SDL International). If you haven’t checked in with the OSCAR (Open Standards for Container/Content Allowing Re-use) Special Interest Group (SIG) at LISA recently, then you should read OSCAR: Visioning the Future of Standards and/or go directly to the OSCAR site. It has been totally re-energized and is now moving quickly to investigate new issues and to propose and adopt new standards.

The “newest kid on the block” from OSCAR is GMX (GILT Metrics) – check out the article that appears in this issue, GILT Metrics – Slaying the Word Count Dragon (Updated). Where is OSCAR headed? More work on segmentation standards through using SRX to define rules. It will also be looking into creating “TBX Light” and “TBX Link” in the area of terminology. It will also investigate a standard for file filtering and consider an XML-based text memory.

Editor’s Note: For excellent examples of how TM and TMX have been implemented extremely successfully, check out the presentation from Mika Pehkonen, Localization Manager at F-Secure, and Francois Richard, Translation and Localization Manager at Hewlett-Packard.

It took Mark Lancaster, President and CEO of SDL International, with his down-to-earth style, to remind us that if you build something that the market wants, then branding will come naturally, based on the value of what you deliver. He also provided insights about where he believes our industry is heading. He noted that there is an increasing involvement by centralized purchasing in localization, and it is focused only on one factor: cost per word. This is damaging to the entire process, and though Lancaster doesn’t believe that localization is a commodity, it will be increasingly seen as one. There will be continued consolidation of vendors – it’s not over yet.

On a positive note, strategic or even tactical selection of a translation solution was rare in the past. However, it is becoming a great deal more common today, with the decisions being made at higher levels with a more strategic approach. It’s now way beyond just a relationship between a salesperson and a client’s mid-level manager. Translation memory continues to be critically important, and Lancaster wonders if workflow management (sometimes incorrectly called “content management systems”) actually creates the savings that was intended. He believes that integration is what’s important and that it separates those who are really successful from those who are not. Standards are key to driving the industry forward, with TMX now considered to be a standard.

In conclusion, the spectrum of customers is increasing. More localization decisions are being made with a strategic view to obtaining the best solution from a black box. The industry is finally maturing, and this is good.

Editor’s Note: For more background on Mark Lancaster’s thoughts on the future, please read Executive Interview: Process and Technology Are the Name of His Game.

As always, there were many other excellent presentations, case studies and workshops (fifty in all) on topics such as Arabic, QA Metrics, Machine Translation and Open Source localization projects that space does not allow us to cover here.

Many thanks to our Program Chairs, Daniel Grasmick, Development Manager at SAP AG, and Kim Harris, Managing Director of text&form Software-Lokalisierung GmbH, for contributing their personal time and energy to make the program possible.

Editor’s Note: LISA’s Annual General Assembly (GA) Meeting also took place during the Forum. There are big changes are on the horizon for LISA. If you are a GA Member, you may read about them and provide input through the Member’s Domain.