Forum Summary

Spirit of collaboration and sense of purpose

Hundreds of attendees at the LISA Forum Asia 2006 China Focus gathered to share the latest trends with one another on how to harness the incredible energy and the innumerable business opportunities that now abound in the Greater China Region. The spirit of collaboration and sense of purpose was beyond anything one could have imagined prior to the Forum. The service providers in this region clearly view themselves as a community of implementers, based on standards. Of course, this attitude is making a tremendous, positive impact for clients who are working with these providers to support their products/services – both within this region and beyond.

How to work together to support Chinese companies going global

The dominant theme during the packed session with new and prospective LISA Members was how to work together to support Chinese companies who are now starting to market globally. It was very clear that the service providers operating in the Greater China Region were more than willing to collaborate to do this. Translator training and liaison activities with universities and professional associations – and always in conjunction with the Chinese Government – were discussed. LISA is also more than willing to share its intellectual property to support this process if service providers in the region translate / publish the materials.

2 trends for Chinese companies going global

Coinciding with President Hu Jintao’s visit to the U.S. and to the Middle East/Africa, two trends became clear. China-based companies are now preparing to support their high-quality products / services with the level of global branding that will be required for success worldwide. In other words, Made in China is on its way to becoming a brand. China is learning how to focus its global marketing efforts, and localization / translation are obviously a key building block in that process.

Being there vs. outsourcing

The second trend is that foreign-based high tech companies in China are starting to move beyond the simple of concept, “We must outsource/offshore to China to save money” and acknowledging the much greater opportunity that lies in truly engaging with the market to service customers locally and to develop local products / services.

New data and revised business process

Both of these trends require new data and revised business processes to find the right model for your organization. The presentations and workshops during the LISA Asia Forum 2006 China Focus event will go a long ways towards supporting you to make the right decisions.

Global trade requires communication first and foremost

Susan Williams, Program Director on the Globalization Leadership Team at IBM, set the tone for the Forum with Going Global: The Corporate Strategy Is Set, Now What? For trade to be successful, people must determine what products they need and then establish relationships to obtain them. Global trade cannot happen unless people can communicate linguistically and culturally. This has been going on for thousands of years. What is new about globalization today is our access to information technology and telecommunications.

We need to become very good at globalization, and LISA is the nexus for it

To quote UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, “It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity.” We need to become very good at globalization, and LISA provides a nexus to share data and best practices and standards. It serves the extremely valuable purpose of allowing all of us to get together to learn from each other how to do things better and to meet the service providers who can support us in this area. (Please visit www.ibm.com/software/globalization for more information on globalizing your software code base.)

Latest information on DITA

Since IBM donated DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) to OASIS last year, it has gained a great deal of traction. Two DITA’s leading proponents and evangelists (Dave Schell, Program Director for Information Development for IBM, and JoAnn Hackos, Owner of Comtech Services) provided the latest information on the progress that has been made, including a demo of the DITA Open Toolkit (Yuan Peng Zhang of IBM’s China Software Development Lab). Along with a panel that included implementers, CMS developers, strategists and customer support managers, they also debated best practices regarding the single most important aspect of managing international operations: multiple language content management.

New OASIS DITA Translation Sub-Committee

Hackos now heads the OASIS DITA Translation Sub-Committee that is studying issues raised by translation agencies. The current discussion centers on how to smooth content flow to translators. There is also a new book, Introduction to DITA, available through the Comtech web site, which includes a tutorial on how to perform DITA tasks.

How open standards can be used as ‘Lego’ building blocks

Andrzej Zydroń is CTO of XML-INTL and one of the driving forces behind LISA’s open standards committee, OSCAR, which underpins such projects as WordForge. In Global Ready Operations: A Focus on Open Standards, he outlined all of the localization industry’s related standards (TMX, TBX, SRX, XLIFF, TWS, GMX, DITA, OLIF, xml:tm and Unicode) and showed how these XML-based, open standards can be used together to improve the localization process. He provided the overall picture as to how open standards can be integrated as the building blocks for efficient and cost-effective multiple language production processes. (For more details read How to Leverage the Maximum Potential of XML for Localization.)

Where will we be in 5 years?

In a second presentation, Zydroń presented his (very personal and honest) vision for global information management for the next ten years in Future Directions for Translation Technology: Preparing for Automated Language Processing. He believes that the change that has been predicted for several years will start to kick in very, very soon since hardware, software, telecommunications and internet infrastructure have now converged to support radically new ways of doing things. Zydroń’s thought-provoking presentation was followed by a panel discussion with the audience actively participating.

WordForge – based on LISA standards

Javier Solá, Co-Director of the WordForge Project, continued with the theme of how to leverage open standards to support localization. Developed to give Free and Open Source software a common platform for localization, WordForge is a complete set of localization tools that allows software to use the latest computer-assisted localization techniques. It is a modular system in which all components are interconnected through the LISA-defined standard formats of XLIFF, TMX and TBX. Components include process management, translation editors, glossary management and use, translation memory, filters and tests.

The business processes and human factors for successful globalization

There were also several presentations on the business process and human components of globalization. HP’s entire Global Operations Translation and Localization Team, along with several of their colleagues (twenty in all!), was at the Forum. The Team shared their expertise in two areas: Back to Basics: Localizing Web Sites for Global Coverage and Global Capacity, Project Scope and Productivity. Bobby Liao, Senior Product Manager for TIBCO Software, discussed why China is an ideal springboard into East Asia, and Melanie Flanders, Chief Information Architect with KnowledgeMasters, covered the common issues associated with localizing documentation and user interfaces that companies encounter when targeting a global market in Writing for Localization: Common Mistakes and Best Practices.

Holistic approach to global information management

Kara Warburton, Terminologist for IBM and Chairperson of the LISA Terminology SIG (click here if you are interested in joining), focused on the basics of terminology management and its role in business in Managing Terminology for Content Management and Localization. (Read Terminology: Getting Down to Business.) In Global Authoring: Technology, Process and Best Practice, Andrew Bredenkamp, CEO of acrolinx, made the case for a holistic approach to producing global information in order to remain competitive. He argued that information development for a global audience should be subject to the same rigorous discipline that is applied to the rest of product development (as did several of the other presenters).

XLIFF in real-life and customizing software applications for China

Turning to a more technical focus, Jue Wang, Manager of Software Engineering for IBM China’s Software Development Lab, demonstrated how to practically apply XLIFF from both a development and a service provider perspective in Value and Challenge: Localization With XLIFF. She explored the hurdles to enjoying the benefits of using an XML-based, end-to-end, tool-neutral interchange format and provided recommendations to both parties on how to partner and manage the transition to an XLIFF environment. Catherine Zhu, Advisory Software Engineer with the same lab, shared the unique features of Chinese support to provide a preliminary, but accurate, picture of what is required for products to be successful in China in Customizing Applications for China.

A new toolset for localizing small display devices

Teleca Sweden has been cooperating with Sony Ericsson to resolve localization issues since 1997, including the development of a set of tools called D-Localizer (the tools generated a lot of interest). Jimmy Lu, Product Manager for Teleca Sweden, shared his experiences and challenges and discussed how various pitfalls can be avoided when it comes to localizing for small display devices. He emphasized the importance of process management and the vital role of communications between internal and external working partners. He also addressed localization issues in the context of product and UI design, marketing, documentation creation, terminology and quality control.

What about SimMarketing, SimTraining and SimSupport?

Hanan Lavy, International R&D Manager for Mercury Interactive, introduced the concepts of SimMarketing, SimTraining, SimSupport and SimProfessional Services in SimShip Is Not Only Simultaneous Shipment. According to many studies, simultaneously shipping (SimShip) localized products with the original product is supposed to produce approximately 30% in additional revenues. However, SimShip involves much more than just shipping the localized products simultaneously. Lavy explained why it is necessary to create other simultaneous processes in parallel to SimShip. He discussed the cross-organizational processes that must be implemented to support these efforts and linked them to the development lifecycle processes. He highlighted what the touch points should be when leveraging technical SimShip to support business growth.

You must know your customers as they know you

John Hammond, Manager of Trade Supply Chain & Logistics Integration in Global Trade Finance for Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong), focused on how leading financial institutions are currently addressing international customer support with respect to language, culture and full-service banking in Business to Business: Localizing Portals in the Financial Services Sector. Global trade finance is all about implementing standards to provide a paperless trail. Hammond manages a central project management team in Singapore that is responsible for B2BeX (www.scb2bex.com), the business-to-business trade portal that Standard Chartered has developed to support multinational corporations and their Asian suppliers. The team’s main focus is to innovate since you must know your customer as he knows you in this day and age.

Will the localization industry rise to the challenge of the 2008 Beijing Olympics?

Dr. Weiquan Lieu from CAPINFO Company Limited (Beijing) presented in place of Professor Hans Uszkoreit and Feiyu Xu. He Lieu discussed some of the technologies being developed by COMPASS 2008, a project jointly funded by the Chinese and German Research Ministries and conducted in close cooperation with the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games to build multilingual information services for the participants and visitors for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He summarized the challenges and opportunities posed by international mega-events to the localization industry and argued that only a carefully planned balance between multilingual technologies and professional human resources will be able to support the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Some concrete and down-to-earth ROI guidelines for globalization

Much has been written about the best practices and standards required to achieve optimum ROI results for localization. The word “optimum” is subjective, however, as every company is unique regardless of its product/service offering. Although many of us have been part of global product rollouts during which we have learned valuable data to integrate for future ROI improvement, we must continue to focus on the following questions. What are the cost drivers for localization? Are there best practices to follow to mitigate or leverage these costs? Are we ready as an organization to support this effort? Should we ship our localized product simultaneously with the original? Are there any simple formulas to integrate these ROI factors into an organization’s cost structures? Brenda Hall, CEO of Bridge360, and Hanan Lavy of Mercury Interactive led the discussion to help participants understand localization ROI factors and how to adapt what may work best for their organizations and teams for future product rollouts.

The localization industry isn’t yet addressing the real needs of Chinese companies going global

Localization in China is almost exclusively an English-Chinese affair. Yet, this does not match the reality of what’s going on in the world today. China passed France last year to become the fourth largest exporting country in the world. China’s trade balance with the U.S. is now 6:1. China has shifted from producing cheap goods to exporting increasingly sophisticated products and is now heavily involved in Africa and Latin America. These activities point to a strong need for localizing from Chinese into many other languages. At present, however, the localization industry has not addressed this need.

Local vs. global strengths needed from localization service providers in China

Kamal El-Wattar, Operations Manager for Rainbow Network first examined China’s current localization requirements and then outlined the case for professional Chinese multi-language service vendors (MLVs) to be available locally to service the growing number of China-based global companies and organizations. He then focused on the “local” strengths which are sought by China-based companies and why, along with the “global” strengths required from local MLVs – all using real-life examples.

Information on all of the other excellent presentations, case studies and workshops

As always, there were many other excellent presentations, case studies and workshops on topics such as lifecycle testing for localization, the essential components of CMS for Chinese companies, globalization and testing services in China, localization vendor qualification in China, the new version of SDL TRADOS 2006, team building for translation projects, running a globalization audit of your business processes, buying and implementing CMS and GTMS and cost-effective design and DTP for multilingual documentation, Please refer to the detailed summaries in this document for more information on all Forum sessions. You may contact admin@lisa.org to find out how to access the presentation slides if you are not a LISA Member.

Thank you!

LISA gratefully acknowledges the assistance of STAR Software (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. for translating the presentations into Chinese for the entire event. And many thanks to our Program Committee: Sen Humbert (Hewlett Packard), Toby Richt (CLS Communication), Peter Stumpf (STAR Software Shanghai) and Michael Anobile (LISA).

LISA will host 4 more events this year around the globe!

Hope to see you at one of the other LISA events this year: the LISA Global Strategies Summit in New York from June 26-30, the Digital Economy Forum 2006 in Washington, D.C., USA from October 5-7, the LISA Forum Europe in Warsaw, Poland from November 13-17 or the LISA Forum Middle East and Africa from December 9-12.

There are 3 new LISA publications now available for download.

Check out our newest publications – better data to help you make better decisions: (1) the 2006 Global Business Practices Survey Report, in partnership with the World Bank and the Monterey Institute of International studies, (2) the 2nd edition of our very popular Best Practice Guide: Managing Global Content and (3) the results of the LISA's 2006 Best International Web Support Sites Awards, in partnership with the Association of Support Professionals.

Localized content delivery is now a key competitive advantage

And remember … localized content delivery is now a key competitive advantage, and China is coming up-to-speed quickly in this area. The key to success is to understand your customers as they understand you. You can then develop an effective global information management process to map to your strategic goals. If you don’t have one, get busy!