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In this issue…
EditorialContent Interoperability and Trust
I just returned from the LISA Forum Europe in Berlin, so I’m in an exceptionally good mood – lots of great content and serious conversations with wonderful friends and colleagues about what really makes a difference in our industry.  It has never been a better time to be part of the globalization industry. We are coming of age as the focus shifts to content interoperability and the recognition that terminology enables global information delivery and determines who you are in your market. Highlighted throughout this year’s LISA Forum Europe Executive Round Table, presentations, panel discussions and workshops were four challenges that the globalization industry will face over the next few years:
I would like to focus on the conversations that took place during the Forum and Executive Round Table about content interoperability and trust, and how you cannot have one without the other. We have raised expectations (exponentially in some areas) In one respect, those of us directly involved in enabling organizations to deliver their products and services on a global basis have done our job well – so well, in fact, that we have raised expectations exponentially in some areas. The European Union is one such region. For approximately the price of a cup of cappuccino per citizen (or 1.5 billion euros per year), the 500 million citizens of the EU not only have the right to communicate with the various EU bodies in their local languages, they have come to expect that right to multilingualism to be enforced and delivered, especially on the web. That means that the current number of documents produced and web pages created (currently at 1.7 million pages and 200,000+ web pages respectively) within the European Commission will only continue to grow, regardless of any limits on content creation that may be enforced. Editor’s Note: Read The Translation Challenge at the European Commission: Multilingualism as a Democratic Right. In the opening keynote for this year’s Forum, Karl-Johan Lönnroth (Director General of the European Commission Directorate-General for Translation – DGT) addressed Responding to Today’s Global Challenge – Globalization’s Key Business and Political Mandates, along with Mark Lancaster, CEO and Founder of LISA Member SDL International. The two men compared and contrasted how they believe the public and private sectors will approach solutions for increasing levels of language services with improved efficiency over the next few years. (If you are a LISA Member, log into the LISA website and then click here to download the slides.) The EU’s challenge is to sell its messages and visions in 506 possible language combinations Lönnroth, using a metaphor of “Seven Sisters and Five Knights,” explained how access is the key for both the public and private sectors – access to the market for private companies and the public’s access to its rights and obligations. The EU is essentially selling rights, messages and visions of Europe as it fulfills its goal of being a “big peace process.” The DGT translates ideas and concepts that allow people to communicate, and, as long as people continue communicating with one another, they generally do not wage war.
How will globalizers keep from drowning in a sea of user-generated content? And yet, as Kirti Vashee (Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Language Weaver) so gently and politely reminded us during his presentation, Translation Tools & Technology: What the Future Holds, we can only address a very, very small percentage of the content being created. The critical issue is now content interoperability between all types of content, both structured and unstructured. (If you are a LISA Member, log into the LISA website and then click here to download the slides.) The only type of content that the globalization industry can efficiently address right now is structured content that can be processed through translation memories (TM) and fed into (global) content management systems. In the meantime, the vast majority of content remains unstructured (emails, one-off reports from experts in all fields, recordings, etc.) and (most of the time) “off the radar” in terms of structured globalization solutions. Why is it so imperative for the globalization industry to face the challenge posed by unstructured content head-on and to do so now? Because the huge amount of user-generated content eliminates any control that globalizers may assume exists with structured content. You can no longer control the subject areas, the terminology, the quality, the format or even the spelling. And, the nature of this content assumes that it’s accessible, thus serving to further raise expectations. Here are just two statistics to keep in mind: 1 billion text messages are now sent in Britain each month 4 billion messages are sent each and everyday in China! I can’t resist – here are a few more: Print, film, magnetic and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes (1 exabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of new data in 2002. It is estimated that 5 exabytes also represents all words ever spoken by human beings! Internet usage will grow much, much faster in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. This means that around four or five of the top ten languages that currently dominate the internet and represent 35% of today’s users (English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, Portuguese, Korean, Italian and Arabic) will morph to Asian languages over the next ten years. User-generated content is increasingly where the value will be in the future Why is this so important? Because user-generated content is increasingly where the value will be in the future. Yet, our current globalization methods and workflow can’t handle anywhere near the volume of content that is being generated. According to Vashee, hybrid SMT systems will be able to help us meet this demand through incorporating syntax and through integration into CMS and text management repositories. He also believes that new leaders will emerge from outside of the traditional translation/localization space to drive the industry forward, so that we can handle more dynamic (rather than static) content to meet the needs of international business as global companies strive to understand their customers’ needs and stay ahead of their requirements. Microsoft and Google are already applying SMT technology Vashee explained how statistical machine translation (SMT) is currently being used to expand the reach of translation and localization way beyond technical documentation to knowledgebase content, emails, web sites, blogs, SMS, chat, etc. Companies like Microsoft and Google are already applying SMT technology successfully to help them deliver knowledgebase content locally and to increase the value of user-generated content by allowing more people access in more languages in real-time. How does SMT accomplish this? By leveraging the customer’s own language assets through shifting the focus to the amount of time it takes to arrive at publishable quality. During the breaks and at dinner, a serious conversation about content interoperability. Content interoperability is becoming more and more important as organizations commit to meeting the requirements and expectations of all of their customers at the same time – no matter where they live or how they interact with the world around them. As we continue to fill in the gaps in the global content supply chain, we cannot afford to omit any of the players or their required workflows for interacting with the rest of the chain to ensure a smooth flow. To understand how both structured and unstructured content can be approached, you must understand where the content is coming from and who is creating it and for what purposes. Both Lisa Seeman (CEO of UB Access) and Dr. Andrew Bredenkamp (CEO and Co-Founder of acrolinx) spoke about how ambiguity can be identified and planned for with new technology upstream when content is first created. Bredenkamp emphasized the role of terminology and controlled language in Add Content Quality Management to Your Localization Process (he was joined by Chris Wong, Senior Software Engineer for LISA Member Idiom Technologies). (If you are a LISA Member, log into the LISA website and then click here to download the slides.) Seeman shared a knowledge-based approach to the automated adaptation of content (through work being done on the semantic web) that ensures that meaning is not lost for different cultures and sub-cultures in Localization for Different Cultural Backgrounds: How Knowledge Technologies Can Change the Paradigm. (If you are a LISA Member, log into the LISA website and then click here to download the slides.) At the end of the day, international business depends on trust – nothing less, nothing more. And, yet, none of this really matters if the people on the virtual teams who are supposed to work together to figure out how to make content inter-operate can’t work together smoothly as a team because their cultures/languages/corporate environment/learning style/or whatever label you choose, are preventing them from doing so. In Scaling for Growth and Organizational Diversity, Philo Holland (Senior Program Manager at T-Systems/Deutsche Telekom) reminded all of us that it doesn’t matter how good our workflow processes and technology are integrated if the Chinese and the Americans, for example, can’t work together on the same team. In other words, as Michael Gates (Managing Director of Richard Lewis Communications) puts it, “Culture eats processes for lunch.” According to a recent study by KPMG, “83% of mergers and acquisitions produced no benefit for the shareholders. Interviews with over 100 senior executives involved in over 700 deals over a two-year period revealed that the overwhelming cause for failure was the people and their cultural differences." T-Systems has consciously decided to manage intercultural interaction as a business process through its Globalization Services Initiative, based on the cultural classification methods of Richard Lewis Communications. They have found that consciously doing so helps employees to drop their emotional baggage and to seriously consider how to really work in teams more productively. And, more importantly, it allows them to be much more flexible and open to customers. (If you are a LISA Member, log into the LISA website and then click here to download the slides.) If there is no trust, the best workflow and technology in the world won’t make any difference. T-Systems is also approaching language and culture from a community perspective as it enables the organization to integrate the two within their other business processes. It is not a team perspective or an individual perspective or a headquarters perspective, and this is an important distinction. T-Systems has consciously decided to approach the trust issue – because that’s what we’re really talking about when all is said and done – through enabling its employees, customers and partners to create, join and participate in the communities that make sense for them. Why is this distinction so important? Because these cross-cultural, multilingual communities – based on common business needs – serve a critical role in building trust among people quickly. They do this through brokering relationships to enable community members to approach a challenge or an issue together, albeit from totally different perspectives. Holland described how he and his virtual team have used this approach to implement a new intranet portal solution that includes language and culture as an integrated part of the content creation process, thus enabling communities to meet their go-to-market and customer service needs much faster and more efficiently. But, this isn’t “your father’s portal.” In other words, it’s not simply a job or service request system. The community-centric, self-service portal has been set up to meet the real underlying need, i.e., to integrate language and culture as a business process within Deutsche Telekom. Users can join communities that help them solve their everyday challenges, e.g., how to rewrite a German marketing communication piece (or better yet, how to create the original content appropriately!) to address the French market in France appropriately. There are cross-cultural tools available as well – and not the “touchy feely” kind. These are tools based on rigorous academic research that have been developed specifically to address such issues as I’m going to be presenting my business case to a diverse audience of executives from China, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. How will these executives process my data through their functional filters, their cultural and language filters, their corporate culture filters, etc.? Holland took the audience through one of these exercises, based on its cultural profile breakdown, followed by a scenario of how to apply the tools for a culture pair based on Germans and Americans. The latter included cultural horizons, mental programming, communication patterns, listening habits, language of management and leadership style. He then applied the cultural classifications to presentation styles, meetings, trust and teams to show how all of us can become much more effective in communicating with all of our colleagues, customers and partners, no matter what our background. Editor’s Note: For the latest insights into how T-Systems/Deutsche Telekom and Oracle are integrating and managing language and culture as a business process, read Paradigm Shift: Managing Language and Culture as a Business Process. Editor’s Note: For an overall take on how trust between players within international business and between companies and society, read ‘Quality Fade’: China’s Great Business Challenge, a very insightful article from the Wharton School of Business, and Exploring Business’ Social Contract: An Interview With Daniel Yankelovich from McKinsey. At the end of my interview with Kevin Lorenc (PerkinElmer’s VP for Corporate Communications) last year (see The Globalization Initiative at PerkinElmer, Inc. ), he invited me to check back this year with his team to find out how much progress they had made in integrating globalization “as just another business process.” During the LISA Forum Europe in Berlin a few weeks ago, Claude Lamoureux (Quality Manager, Information Management Quality and Regulatory Management) was kind enough to share their latest news. Find out what he had to say in Driving Behavioral Change in the Life Sciences: An Update on the Globalization Initiative at PerkinElmer (premium). It’s time to stop using Excel spreadsheets! Content Managers need to be able to see everything at-a-glance – who’s doing what, where the bottlenecks are, how many topics have been started, how many are done, how many have been approved, how many are being translated, and how much it costs to perform all these tasks. Find out how content management systems can support you with your content metrics in Everything-at-a-Glance: CMS Control Panels, by Scott Abel (CM Pros) and Diane Wieland (Journalist) (public). Many, many thanks to Kara Warburton, as the outgoing Chair of the LISA Terminology SIG, and a warm welcome to Hanne Smaadahl as the newly elected Chair The LISA Terminology SIG elected Hanne Smaadahl, Senior Terminologist for Business Objects, to replace Kara Warburton of IBM as its Chair during the recent the LISA Forum Europe in Berlin. Warburton has served as Chair for the Terminology SIG since its creation in 2000. During that period, the SIG has come to be a very respected voice within the globalization industry as it has tirelessly evangelized terminology and its critical role in creating and maintaining global brands. Warburton will now focus on the drive to have TBX, the LISA open standard for TermBase eXchange, accepted as an ISO standard. As the newly elected Chair, Smaadahl plans to build on the legacy that Warburton has created. Click here for more details. ANNOUNCEMENTS We invite you to join us for the LISA Forum Asia CHINA FOCUS 2008 in Beijing from March 10-14. LISA has an unmatched record in China and strong ties to the Chinese standards community, manufacturers and developers. CHINA FOCUS 2008 is the place to be if you are doing business in China and need to understand the issues that will impact you, or if you are a Chinese company preparing to move out of China and onto the world stage. Click here for more information and to register. Join CIDM and OASIS for the 3rd Annual 2007 DITA Europe Conference in Brussels, Belgium on November 13 and 14. This conference is for anyone interested in implementing XML DITA or learning more about this new standard for topic-based authoring. Meet publications professionals who have implemented DITA in their organizations and hear from representatives of key tools vendors who are actively supporting the DITA community. For more information, click here.
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    8-12 December 2008 |
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