A New Globalization Consulting Services Program

A New Web Site

A New Membership Program

… and Announcing …

The LISA Forum Cairo 2005

The entire LISA Team has been working overtime to enhance and support the leading international forum for people who work around the clock to serve international customers by providing them with world-class products, service and support.

The proof?

• A new Globalization Consulting Services Program that provides access to LISA’s network of Globalization Consultants who can teach you how to attract and support customers worldwide – the right way – from day 1.
• A new LISA web site where you will find the clear guidelines, best practices and standards to enable your organization to deliver on its international objectives – without constantly reinventing the wheel.

• A new LISA Membership Package with original and innovative entitlements to attract companies from all industry sectors and to show them how to operate successfully worldwide.
• … and to deliver on our goal of sharing the expertise developed over the last 15 years by LISA’s more than 500 corporate members, international institutions, government ministries and trade organizations, we proudly announce LISA Forum Cairo 2005, our very first Forum to be held in the Middle East (December 2005).

If you are not already a LISA Member, we encourage you to consider becoming one – soon! You know that being global is more than just having offices in another country or selling products in another language. Our community of Globalization Professionals has overcome the same challenges that you are now facing and is willing to share the benefits of this experience to help you shorten your learning curve through clear guidelines, best practice and standards to enable your organization to deliver on its international objectives.

Whether you need information about what works and what doesn’t, access to potential partners, unbiased consulting services, or data to formulate your international market strategies, LISA membership will deliver real value as you focus on meeting your international objectives without reinventing the wheel. All of this, while enabling you to maintain or improve the quality of whatever service/product you deliver outside of your home market. Join today!

And now, back to our editorial for this month …

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According to Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the internet, the number of users on the web is on the order of a billion users: a quarter of them in North America, a third in Europe, maybe 40% in Asia, and the rest elsewhere. According to Cerf, Asia obviously will become the biggest single group because India, China, Indonesia and Malaysia are all located there. There will eventually be a large amount of Chinese-, Hindi- and other Asian-language content on the network, which means that anybody who's paying attention to the Net is going to have to think much more creatively about language.

Source: Tony Perkins Blog on Always On, posting for 31 August 2005, Billions of Users and Devices, With Woefully Inadequate Security.

And Heidi Roizen, one of Silicon Valley’s former entrepreneurs and now a venture capitalist, sees it this way from a business perspective, “The internet is changing the venture investment dynamic. Companies can be global from the very beginning, from talent to customers.”

Source: John Furrier’s podcast, Silicon Valley, Technology and Media InfoTalk – The Fresh Voices Platform, August 2005, Heidi Roizen: Silicon Valley Is Back!

One of the newest ways to enable many of these non-English-users to find information much more easily and much faster (and, of course, to reach them as potential customers!) is through web site Google-ization. Since terminology is its foundation, web site creators will need the help of language service providers to leverage this new process. Read Curt Porritt’s article in this issue (premium), Google-ization: How It Will Impact the GILT Community.

The results of one of LISA’s most recent polls, “Do you optimize the localized versions of your web site search?” revealed that respondents were about evenly split on the issue, with 42% performing this optimization, 46% not and 13% who didn’t know.

Editor’s Note: If you are a LISA Member, check out Porritt’s presentation, Website Google-ization: Localizing for Search Engines, at the recent LISA Global Strategies Summit in Boston (USA).

For more information on the research that backs up the business case for culturally customizing your web site, check out Cultural Customization: The Next Imperative in Web Design (premium), excerpt two from the book, The Culturally Customized Web Site: Customizing Web Sites for the Global Marketplace, by Professors Nitish Singh and Arun Pereira. According to the authors, the web globalization industry lacks the tools and framework to do the cultural customization that is required for web sites to be completely successful. The book offers 36 web site features (all empirically tested) that are the basis for cultural customization that can be used to change this. Click here to read excerpt one from the book.

If you would like to have independent experts provide detailed feedback on how well your web site supports customers worldwide and what could be improved, then enter the first Year’s Ten Best International Web Support Sites Awards Program. LISA and The Association of Support Professionals (ASP – known worldwide for its Ten Best Web Support Sites program) are collaborating to produce this program. If your site is selected as one of the Best International Web Support Sites, your work will be recognized and profiled in a book to be published by LISA in early 2006. The deadline for entry is October 17, so click here today to find out how to enter.

Editor’s Note: For some interesting statistics on web usage, check out http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

And the backbone for all of this? Terminology, of course. We interviewed Kara Warburton, responsible for IBM’s terminology strategy and Chairperson of the LISA Terminology SIG, about how terminology functions as the foundation for so much of what is happening on the web these days – ontology development, the semantic web, metadata descriptions, etc. Warburton will be leading a workshop during the LISA Forum Europe in Zurich on November 10-11, Developing Products for Multinational Markets: Effective Terminology Management.

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Insider: Why do you believe that it's so important to do this workshop at this point in time?

Warburton: We're now increasingly operating in a global marketplace, right? Well, when you are developing products and/or services for global markets, it is essential to be prepared to address the issues around the key terminology in your offering, so that you can avoid costs and delays. And by "developing," I mean both creating and translating any of the product/service information: packaging, marketing materials, user guides, software files, and so forth.

Most of us now realize that to be competitive we have to manage information efficiently. We have to be fast without sacrificing quality. Yet many people don't realize that terminology is a key part of this, with its own unique approaches. Most of the training programs in information management, product development, translation, marketing, and so forth, do not include any information about managing terminology for global markets.

That's why it is so important for LISA to offer this workshop at this time.

Insider: What is your advice for middle managers who understand the value of managing terminology, but who are struggling to educate their upper managers?

Warburton:

1. Give upper managers an executive presentation that scares them.

2. Make sure that the presentation is short and to the point.

3. Include simple, straightforward examples of the worst problems that have occurred as a result of your not managing terminology from the beginning.

4. Estimate the costs of such problems in terms of lost productivity and customer satisfaction.

5. You will need to do your homework beforehand, such as collecting user feedback, conducting surveys, leading focus groups of your peers, and searching product materials for errors.

We will cover some of these topics in the workshop.

Insider: How can a company really improve its brand image through terminology management?

Warburton: Brand names are usually not translated. So, when deciding on a name for your brand, find an expression that will be universally recognized and understood with ease. You don't want to wake up after your product is on the shelf to discover that the brand name has a negative connotation or is vague and/or meaningless for some customers.

After the brand has a name, make sure that all other information created for the brand (marketing material, packaging, user guides, and so forth) uses consistent terminology that fits the brand's image and is appropriate for all target markets. This requires controlled preselection of appropriate terminology.

If you don't have a plan, you're taking a big risk and leaving all of this to chance. And, worst of all, you will end up with a mixed bag of materials that won't present a cohesive message to your customers.

Insider: Why don’t more people use TBX, the terminology markup standard? How difficult is it to convert proprietary terminology databases to TBX?

Warburton: TBX isn't widely used because the average terminology resource, at least for small- to mid-sized language services companies, isn't robust enough to require it. If your terminology consists of source terms, target terms, plus a few other bits of information, then you don't need TBX to represent it or to exchange it with other people or other applications. And if you have no intention of exchanging your data, then stick with spreadsheets. However, the problem here isn't TBX... it’s that such terminology resources are inadequate to meet the increasingly sophisticated demands of the information management and localization industries.

On the other hand, the LISA Terminology SIG recently converted more sophisticated terminology of several larger companies from proprietary formats to TBX. The exercise resulted in a more stable, well-formed structure of the data. Editor’s Note: Read Terminology: Getting Down to Business.

Having a standard to map to enables companies to develop exchange mechanisms that can be reused over and over again, allowing the data to be effectively repurposed in different linguistic applications, irregardless of its source.

Insider: What are the opportunities for leveraging terminology in the broader information management industry?

Warburton: Terminology used to be strictly a translator's job. Not any more. Due to advancements in information technology, terminology data can now benefit a wide range of tasks, and the potential uses are growing. But on the down side, most existing terminology collections – heavy with the baggage of their translation roots – don't contain the right information to be effectively used in these areas. We have a lot of work to do.

For example, the benefits of using terminology data for controlled authoring are huge. Terminology data can be used in automated solutions to enforce consistency in language use. This improves the quality of information, increases productivity in content development and reduces translation costs.

Information about synonyms and hierarchical relations between terms can be used to enhance search engines and information retrieval. Without comprehensive information about terminology, machine translation quality is very poor. Research areas, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications and knowledge management systems, require terminology data for tasks such as sense disambiguation.

Aside from the data itself, there is a direct connection between terminology methodology, which is based on concepts, and fields like the semantic web, information management, knowledge management, ontology development, product classification, data modelling, metadata descriptions – in sum, any activity involving the systematic organization of information and concepts. The people involved in these activities can benefit from sharing knowledge and data with terminologists, and vice-versa. Indeed, this is already occurring at higher levels through liaisons between the ISO TC 37, which is responsible for terminology standards, and groups leading some of these emerging fields.

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How are some of the largest groups of users implementing all of these new ideas, technology and workflow processes? We checked in with Karl-Johan Lonnroth, Director-General, European Commission, Directorate-General for Translation, to find out how the thousands of translators, reviewers, terminologists and project managers at the European Commission (EC) are coming to grips with all of these issues. Suffice it to say that, the next time you are tempted to bemoan the fact of how difficult your job is, think of Lonnroth, his people and their challenges at the European Commission: 380 (!) possible language combinations, text that can literally be on any subject that you can think of, a quickly dwindling supply of professionals who can perform the work required, a majority of content creators who do not work in their native language, etc. etc. Read The Translation Challenge at the European Commission: Multilingualism as a Democratic Right in this issue (premium).

We thought you might also be interested in knowing about the Outsourcing World Summit, to be held in Orlando, Florida (USA) next year from February 20-22. It will also be the annual meeting for the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP).

That’s it for this month. I love hearing from our readers, so don’t forget to drop me an email at editor@lisa.org anytime.