Wanting to discuss this new strategy, I approached a fellow with a Wal-Mart badge wearing a vest, which shouted ‘May I Help You?’ on the back, and asked “When did you decide on this new business strategy to mix paint?” He was – to use the vernacular – ‘a good ole boy’ and looked at me quizzically, like I had just arrived from Mars and spoke only Swahili. He responded, “You want some paint mixed?”

Fortunately, I didn’t get the same reaction when I approached Terry Lawlor, now VP of Authoring Solutions at SDL, at the annual conference of the STC (Society for Technical Communication) in Minneapolis, where I lived for thirty years. When I inquired about his new title, he didn’t ask, “Why do you ask, do you need something authored?”

Content Management Is Hot in Corporate America

The term content management is hot in corporate America these days, and the STC Conference reflected that. It was well-attended as always, with a record 70 vendors showing up – only 22 of which were localization and translation firms, with the rest in content management. It used to be that it was only the language vendors that came to these events that draw several thousand attendees.

The STC crowd is very low key – not usually decision makers in their companies. However, they are important stakeholders in choosing content management vendors. It struck me during the conference that they don’t quite know what to make of their new-found celebrity status. STC should get on the bandwagon and change its name to the Society of Content Management to reflect the new reality. Or, to paraphrase former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln:

“Some content management is technical communication part of the time, but all technical communication is content management all of the time.”

Rather than beat your competitor by offering lower cents per word, Terry Lawlor said that the real savings in globalization firms lies in authoring from the beginning. So instead of acquiring yet another localization and translation firm, SDL went out and bought Tridion, a content management firm.

Industry analyst Don DePalma expressed it this way to me, “After years of expecting a Documentum or Vignette to acquire an Idiom or a TRADOS, we were surprised to see a translation technology company acquire a CMS (content management system) company. SDL’s logic was clear – it wanted to climb up the content life cycle to a more defensible, more lucrative position. That’s not translation but content management, authoring and source.”

A Google search reveals that the size of the U.S. market for content management software is US $4 billon. Sue Feldman, the Analyst who covers content management at IDC, says the market is growing at 35% a year.

Money and Multilingual Madness

I also realized at the STC conference that one of my life’s dreams has been realized. That old story about cultural correctness gone amiss when General Motors introduced a car called the ‘Nova’ is not used anymore to highlight the danger in product naming (‘No va’ means ‘It won’t go’ in Spanish). The story is a total fabrication by the way.

It has been replaced by ‘VISTA.’ Although VISTA means ‘view’ in Spanish, it means ‘hen’ or, in the vernacular, ‘frumpy old woman” in Latvian. Who would have thought five years ago that publishers should worry about what something means in a ‘minor’ language like Latvian. But being Latvian, I can attest that there is no such thing as a minor language. Terry Lawlor’s presentation at STC, Putting on the Style, included the misuse of VISTA as the main example of cultural incorrectness.

Incidentally, the new VISTA operating system really acts like the frumpy old woman after which it is named (my apologies to the frumpy old women of the world). I thought I had a great deal when I bought a new Dell Inspiron laptop with VISTA. However, since VISTA kept crashing, I had it removed. It was too powerful and complicated besides. All I needed was a reliable Volkswagen to go back and forth to the grocery store to buy milk; instead, I got a complicated racecar that kept breaking down.

But the story doesn’t end there. I had my computer guy uninstall VISTA and install the Office 2007 Suite. This is powerful, yet easy to use. But there is a linguistic battle going on in its soul. You will discover this when you do a spellcheck with Outlook Express under Office 2007 that turns out to be in French. Obviously, this is part of a conspiracy led by Alliance Française and a French-speaking programmer at Microsoft.

Don’t believe me? This is the multilingual talk of the web! Just enter ‘Outlook Express Languages’ in Google and the results will show the thousands of people looking for help in solving this ‘problem.’ Fortunately, they are finding some answers as well – there is now a patch to download.

And my “great deal on a Dell?” Between having to buy Office 2007 to replace VISTA, having two computer geeks install it, and solving the French spellcheck problem, the Dell computer that I thought was a deal at US $525 cost me over US $1,000 by the time all was said and done.

Incidentally, money talks as Dell has now replaced VISTA as the operating system in many of its computers after getting thousands of complaints from people like me.

Boom Everywhere in All languages

YouTube just announced that it will be available in seven additional languages. This occurred even after one of YouTube’s founders, Steve Chen (who started Pay Pal) swore he would never go through the localization of a web company after putting PayPal into Chinese (for a candid account of this project by PayPal’s Development Technical Lead for its Global Foundations Engineering Team, read We Need to Be in China Now! (Or, How PayPal Migrated to Unicode). YouTube’s new sites will be in Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. YouTube "would love" to be in Germany, and Chen states, “This is just the beginning.”

Meanwhile the ‘old iron’ boom is on. Another exhibitor at STC was SH3, which focuses on translating and localizing documentation about machinery. Jackie Smith, SH3’s long-time Representative, shared the following for the growth in exports of U.S.-made farm equipment from 2005 to 2006.

Growth in Sales of U.S. Farm Machinery 2005 to 2006

Canada + 2%
Mexico + 18%
Australia – down 8%
Germany + 22%
France + 6%
U.K. - down 1%
Belgium + 71
China + 97%
Netherlands + 26%
Russia + 5%

In a rebirth of old Telecom, the localization industry is benefiting from Ericsson’s success in China where it has been increasing market share by offering bio-fuel power solutions and easier financial terms. Ericsson has a 35% market share in China and seems to have an edge over its rivals, Alcatel-Lucent and Motorola, in emerging markets. One of its competitors asked a vendor to estimate the cost of re-editing 2,000 pages of technical French documentation into something more readable. According to most contracts, this service is called ‘validation’ and costs extra.

And speaking of Ericsson, I had occasion to speak with Bengt Björn of Interverbum, the Swedish-based translation and localization firm that specializes in Nordic languages. Founded in 1974, Björn became the sole owner in 1999. The firm has reported a 25% sales increase in each of the last three years, and it has won the last seven tenders they have bid on! This firm grew out of an in-house translation group at Ericsson and is now one of its major service providers. It has just expanded into Singapore and the Western U.S. LISA Executive Board Member Lyra Spratt-Manning is the company’s new U.S. West Coast Representative.

The Twelve-Year Rule and How Companies Are Growing

Translations.com, which probably had the biggest presence (I counted 10 people) at the STC Conference, doesn’t feel that getting into the CMS game is for them. It keeps buying firms already in the globalization business and letting them run themselves. Now at US $70 million in sales, it just acquired ISP, the Dutch-based globalization software firm. International Software Products helps Translations.com expand in Western Europe and Asia. The founder of ISP, Martijn Heertje noted that “the business model that translations.com embraces allows my team to retain the autonomy, flexibility and speed that we are accustomed to.”

Lionbridge, meanwhile, reported revenue of US $108.7 million for the first three months of 2007, up 10% from the previous year. Following the old dictum that your best sale is your last sale, Lionbridge reported that sales from its top 10 customers increased 13% from the previous year. Its stock is selling at around US $6.80 a share.

Terry Lawlor offered another insight about his company’s acquisition of Tridion for £47 million while we were in Minneapolis. He noted that stock analysts understand content management software better than they do localization, and that the acquisition gave their stock a little bounce. The charts bear him out that the acquisition of Tridion took place in April and their stock is about 100 pence higher now at 425 pence a share.

As we go to press, SDL has also announced that it has acquired PASS Engineering, which publishes the popular PASSOLO software. PASS was founded in 1990 and survived alone a little longer than the average corporate life span of 12 years. Tridion lasted 8 years as an independent company. Oddly, if you average these two lifespans, it comes out to 12.5 years.

Since I once worked for a firm that was acquired by RWS Group, this company has been interesting for me to watch. After losing what I estimate to be over US $20 million in an ill-fated U.S. acquisition, it notes in its latest annual report that it has a tax loss carryover of more than £40 million. The company has refocused itself (80% of its business comes from patent translations) and has now begun to expand into the standard localization and translation world. In the six months ended March 31, 2007, sales came to £22.6 million pounds. It notes “strong performance from the patent translations business, new client wins in Europe and the USA, and a Beijing office now open for business." In June, it announced the purchase of JLS, a Japanese technical translation provider whose specialty is high-level translations from Japanese to English. The RWS share price is now around 360 pence.

The Latvian firm Tilde, which is around US $10 million in sales, is well -known for work in the Baltic languages. One of its main projects is now the EuroTermBank (ETB), a European development project for European digital content for global networks.

Editor’s Note: If you are a LISA Member, you can access the latest information on this project in Globalization of Terminology: Challenges and Solutions, a joint presentation given by Signe Rirdance (EuroTermBank Director and head of Tilde) and Christian Galinski (Director of Infoterm) during the LISA Forum Asia in Beijing earlier this year. Log onto the LISA web site and go to http://www.lisa.org/archive/forums/2007beijing/presentations.html.

In the MT (machine translation) field, Systran is still holding its own. Last year, it recorded sales of €9.3 million compared to €10.1 the year before. In the first quarter of 2007, sales came to €2.2 million.

Language Weaver just held its Technical User and Integrator Event outside of Washington, D.C. in the U.S. Rod Holland of MITRE Corporation was the keynote speaker. MITRE, a non-profit U.S. government technology research and development company, recently created a secure instant messaging system for NATO in a number of languages. (Read Soooo, You Want to Do Business With the U.S. Government?)

Since we began this edition of Money Talks discussing strategy, we should probably end with that. We had earlier written that McNeil Technologies was bought by VERITAS capital in order to fill out its portfolio of firms selling services to the U.S. government; languages were part of these.

In December, it seemed that McNeil – together with DynCorp – won what seemed to be a multi-billion dollar contract to offer a wide variety of language services to the U.S. Army. The joint venture between McNeil and DynCorp is called Global Linguist Solutions LLC. The losing bidder had the contract contested by the Government Accounting Office (GAO, the U.S. government ‘s auditor), who entered the fray on its behalf to see if there were any irregularities. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army asked the GAO to back off and let the contract proceed. In summary, when the smoke clears, either Global Linguist Solutions or L3 Communications will be the largest language services vendor in the world.

---

John Freivalds is Managing Director of JFA Marketing and publisher of The Periodic Tables (Languages, Money, First Class and Toasts). He can be reached at john@jfamarketing.com. Kevin Donovan, a student at Washington Lee University, has joined JFA as a Marketing Intern and helped Freivalds compile this issue of Money Talks.