I think Jean-Francios Van (Product Localization Senior Manager at Adobe) expresses it best when he describes the root challenge of globalization to be the need to globalize the company, not just a particular function, to ensure a company’s success. This means that all functions within a company need to be aligned and ready to support new markets. And it requires a long-term, coordinated and consistent commitment in terms of strategy, investment model and leadership.

Read on to find out what organizations like Adobe, the Translation Bureau of Canada, EMC, Nokia, PerkinElmer, TÜV Rheinland Group, along with some well-known globalization consultants, consider to be their top challenges and possible solutions for 2008.

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Jean-François Vanreusel, Product Localization Senior Manager, Adobe

1. Deliver more localized versions than ever before with, or soon after, English

The workload faced by Adobe’s Product Localization team continues to expand as new products emerge and more localized versions are added to existing products. We mainly tackle this problem at 3 levels:

(a) Internationalization

To reduce localization defects and to ease the automation of the localization process, it is imperative for our products to be well internationalized. We work closely with product development teams to ensure they comply with Adobe’s world-readiness requirements. By addressing the issues at their root and early on, we can reduce a lot of the localization workload: 'Fix problems once and for all languages!'

(b) Automation

Another imperative to increase the team’s throughput is to fully automate the localization process. Automation will allow us to leverage legacy work (e.g., translations, dialog layouts) and help us stay on track with the English versions with limited incremental resources.

(c) Resources

Though products may benefit from a well-internationalized architecture and a fully automated localization process, we may still need to add resources to reduce the gap between the release dates of the English vs. the localized versions.

2. Develop a global team of localization experts

The Product Localization team is dispersed globally with employees in India, Romania, China, Japan and across the US. A key challenge is to distribute the workload by leveraging each campus’ core competencies. In addition, it is beneficial for each campus to work in a similar way to improve the flexibility in project assignments. We plan to address this problem by (a) performing some job rotations (i.e., employees working a few weeks/months on a different campus to share knowledge), (b) increasing process standardization and documentation, and (c) encouraging employees to attend localization and internationalization conferences/courses.

3. Expand knowledge and experience in Web 2.0/SaaS localization

Most of the Product Localization experience is in desktop/shrink-wrapped applications, but the team will need to adapt to the Web 2.0/SaaS paradigm shift. The Product Localization team will be involved at two levels. First, Adobe offers a SaaS development platform composed of products such as AIR and Flex which will need to be internationalized and localized – which is fairly new to Adobe. Second, Adobe will start to develop products on this platform that will need to be localized. Localizing these products will require changes in our process (to be quicker on our feet), our tools and our world-readiness guidelines.

4. Scale the organizations, functions and process to prepare to address emerging markets

The root challenge of Globalization is that we need to globalize the company, not just the engineering function, to ensure the company’s success. All functions within the company need to be aligned and ready to support these new markets. This requires a long-term, coordinated and consistent commitment in terms of strategy, investment model and leadership.

Donald Barabé, Vice President of Professional Services, Translation Bureau, Government of Canada

At the LISA Forum held in Germany last October, I made a presentation entitled Regulated Client, Unregulated Industry – A Mattel Waiting to Happen. (If you are a LISA Member, you can log into the LISA web site and click here to download the presentation.) In it, I underlined some of the risks for clients in dealing with an unregulated industry: (1) selection of service providers by trial and error; (2) uneven quality; (3) liability issues; (4) client brand and image vulnerability. And on the reverse side of the coin, the service provider also faces major risks and issues: (1) unfair competition between professional providers and amateurs; (2) price cutting; (3) commoditization of professional services – always faster and cheaper; (4) liability issues.

What is needed in the industry today?

• Barriers to entry (diploma, certification)
• Independent certifying body
• Industry-wide standards (quality control)
• Seal of conformity
• Code of ethics
• Liability insurance
• Greater visibility

Language industry stakeholders here in Canada are working on a national standard for translation service providers, which we hope to have in place by the end of 2008.

Another major challenge facing the industry this year is its positioning vis-à-vis new language technology developments. Recent advances in machine translation are a source of both opportunities and challenges.

Will technology finally create an opportunity for supply to meet demand? But what about quality? When it comes to language, "good enough" is not good enough. Language is not a way of speaking, but a way of thinking. We cannot simply satisfy ourselves with a "good enough way of thinking."

Note: The Canadian Government’s Translation Bureau has a keen interest in language technologies and MT in particular. It is a founding member partner of the Language Technologies Research Centre and has been using MT successfully for weather reports for over 30 years.

Jessica Roland, Director, International Product Operations, EMC Corporation

For 2008, scaling our division's simultaneous shipment model to handle a significant increase in products and languages is key. We think there are three globalization industry trends that will help us do this. For 2008, we will intensively work with our Language Service Providers, peer companies and industry groups to make these trends a solid reality:

• As our global reach extends, the ability to add languages beyond the Top 10 is key to increasing our worldwide revenue (think "The Long Tail!"). The current localization industry pricing model does not enable us to do this cost-effectively. You will see this topic being raised at industry forums more frequently in 2008, as we try to find a solution.
• We are enthusiastic users of Machine Translation, having over the past two years seen MT technology finally achieve a level of quality that makes it an effective tool. We are very excited about the current globalization industry initiative to pool domain-specific language data in order to better fuel MT engines and to ensure greater consistency. As we use MT more, we will need all of our LSP partners to ensure their post-editing skills and capacity are ready.

We have grown our number of LSPs over the years, and gone are the days when we were able to maintain all of our Translation Memories (TMs) with a single LSP, on a single technology platform. Like many of our peer companies, we have centralized our TMs in an LSP-neutral globalization management system that connects to our LSPs' platforms. This connection has to be as smooth and "loss-less" as possible, and so we need our suppliers to increase their cooperation and support for open standards. You will see a great deal of communication in 2008 on this subject.

Localization Manager for Global Customer Care, Mobile Communications Manufacturer

I see the following as trends in 2008:

1) Small world, small industry: I've witnessed many translation agency folks becoming my colleagues, and at the same time, a handful of my colleagues in content creation/localization teams leaving my company to join agencies. Working with people from different cultures/backgrounds will continue to be quite a challenge, though.

2) Centralization of localization services functions: Managing localization coordination activities globally for all languages worldwide, instead of being handled separately at different sites.

3) 1-4-many content creation: To save money by leveraging more from each piece of content.

4) Subcontracting model for non-core services: Smaller internal teams, less internal staff needed due to the subcontracting model. Last year, I outsourced up to 90% of our localization coordination work to my agencies by having one of their staff based onsite in my office in China and Singapore. The existing internal staff job profile has changed as a result. These people now perform specialized tasks, e.g., the supervision of external coordinators, and managing (a) cost and process issues, (b) company-sensitive information and (c) tools and software.

5) Competitive industry: More and more small upstarts are being formed to offer more value for the money in translation. However, they are still a long way from challenging the localization giants like Lionbridge and SDL.

Claude Lamoureux, Quality Manager, Information Management Quality and Regulatory Management, PerkinElmer Life and Analytical Sciences

1. Improve the product requirement definition process through

• Attributing a formal role to local customer support (sales and service) organizations to gather customer feedback systematically
• Imposing the creation of a geographical roadmap for a product's lifecycle
• Internationalization training for product managers

2. Ensure that product developers understand the importance of language support through internationalization training specific to a programming language

3. Consolidate content creation resources and harness their production under a common platform based on XML and DITA.

Andreas Voss, Global Internet Coordinator, TÜV Rheinland Group

1. Make boring content interesting

Content is king for internet sites, but how do you make certification and testing interesting and appealing, especially since customers ‘tick’ different globally? More and more, we will use our certificator and social web ideas to accomplish this, focusing even more on the use of personas and use cases. We have already started a major project with information architects to develop user-centered naming and structure for our content. Our goal is to work out a user-centered internet site, and then move forward to a user-centered company.

2. Make time to help people work with each other to maintain and extend 45 web sites

With 45 country web sites, in addition to our corporate site, we must enable editors in all countries to be competent, to feel welcome and to become integrated – without any travel. Web 2.0 will help with training through blogs, videos and online conferencing. We are already doing a great job in supporting our authors by displaying books or seminars according to the content of a web page automatically (like AdWords).

3. Make global content as local as possible.

As we attract international customers from countries all over the world, our English internet pages are very important in all countries. But as we sell very similar services worldwide, it seems impossible to optimize for search engines with common rules, while avoiding the use of duplicate content (which leads to a lower ranking by search engines). Localization of content and writing will be the keys.

Aaron Marcus, President, Aaron Marcus and Associates

1. Globalization is a strategic issue for every business, not just multinationals

Because web sites, extranets, blogs, email, VOIP, video sites, shopping sites, social networks, business networks, and other telecommunication media operate instantly, incessantly, and globally, every business has potential benefits from thinking globally – even if it acts locally. Consequently, every business risks overlooking global customers, resources and competition. Size may matter, but even the smallest of operations can transform itself from being a purveyor of unique products or services to an international star. At the very least, new sources of income, talented development, and ideas become possible by ever-easier means.

The globalization-oriented executive will seek to make key components of the company's strategy support global opportunities.

2. Cross-cultural communication issues are more complex and have greater impact than you ever imagined

Ten years ago, who in the West knew the difference between Sunni and Shia versions of Islam? Who thought about the impact of images, and names, other than a limited number of branding experts? Now, the potential benefit and risk of terms, colors, photos, cartoons, layouts, languages, concepts, and emotions, are heatedly debated, not only in a few advertising war-rooms, but by product/services developers worldwide, as they search for the right way to communicate facts, concepts, and emotions.

Culture-centered design, as an offshoot of user-centered design has been raised to global consciousness. We have only begun to notice carefully how different groups view Websites in different viewing paths (e.g, how Chinese, Korean, and US viewers navigate Websites, as examined by researchers in Korea). Armed with this knowledge, and more powerful tools, it makes it more feasible to develop specific designs for specific people in specific languages to make products and services more usable, useful, and appealing.

The globalization-oriented executive will seek to inform himself/herself about cultural issues and techniques for incorporating development techniques to respond to specific needs of the company.

Andrew Draheim, Management Consultant, DIG-IT!

1. Making it all work in China (client orientation, quality mindedness, supply of qualified translators)

2. Socialization of computing (impact on multilingual content management, staff needs and satisfaction)

3. Moving away from TEP (translate, edit, proof) to develop quality at source, supported by continuous improvement initiatives

4. Price per word vs. US dollar (will localization service provides be able to increase prices or find other sources of value/revenue?)