It's not just about Translation!

SDL OneWeb – An essential component of effective Global Information Management

In today’s global business environment, all corporations must remain agile in the face of increasing competition. Keeping ahead of your competition requires a fresh approach to building relationships with your customers – and language is key.

It’s not just about the Translation! - A multilingual strategy is essential to enable cost effective growth into global markets
- Dealing with regional, national, and geographic boundaries is much more than a problem of language only
- The real challenge is to formulate a strategy which allows a company to operate more effectively on a global scale in a cost effective manner
- Your strategy team should include representation from each department, including business owners, strategic management, authors (web and technical publications), localization teams, and IT
- You need to define up front the current state challenges
- You need to understand how other global organizations are addressing the challenges
- Build a firm return on investment and business case to address these areas
Align people, processes, and technology with globalization strategy
- You need a detailed understanding of your global effectiveness - in terms of infrastructure, process and revenue generated from foreign markets
- Identify areas for cost savings, branding improvements, and time-to-market accelerators
- Develop an integrated plan for people, processes and technology to achieve the globalization objectives
Develop a tiered information architecture that supports flexibility for global, regional, and local content
- The majority of organizations will localize a prioritized subset of their content
- You need to analyze “what” content is required to go global and why
- You need to create a “tiered” web site structure where content is translated and localized based on pre-defined business requirements, limitations, and objectives
- “Tiering” involves designing web content presentation, and just as important navigation, based on global, regional and local needs
Prioritize content that directly impacts the global customer experience
- It is imperative that customer-facing websites provide consistent and high-quality content, while maintaining brand
- "Tiering" provides a mechanism to provide the best user experience possible for a global audience.
Centralize and reuse translation assets and terminology
- Much written content can be reused in different formats, such as in marketing collateral, on the website, as an introduction to a user guide or in a white paper
- Being able to write once, reuse sections of content and then apply them to different formats helps authors save time, costs and improve content quality
- Asset re-use can help reduce translation requirements by 30-60%
- Centralized terminology is one of the keys to successful mergers and acquisitions
Centralize budgets for multilingual delivery
- Ownership for multilingual strategy should be centralized within Corporate Marketing, with direct accountability to the CMO
- Ensures that multilingual expenditure can be monitored and controlled
Involve the regions to ensure buy-in and local relevance
- The most effective global websites have a 'hybrid' model combining global and regional content
- Head office is responsible for business rules, content guidelines, international style guide, general content etc.
- Individual markets determine which of the general content they need to have localized for their market, and also author content specific to their market.
Centralize workflow processes for global content maintenance and synchronization
- Enables access and integration with enterprise content and data from various sources, including content management systems
- Enables translation throughput to be increased and time-to-market reduced by automating manual processes
- Enables real-time reporting of translation performance metrics for continuous process improvement
Put in place controls for global brand consistency
- Establish brand KPIs to measure consistency on an ongoing basis
- Implement global control mechanisms to monitor and highlight branding violations
- Establish feedback loops that ensure resolutions are implemented
Understand that your content management system (CMS) cannot do translation management
- CMS's are not designed to manage global content creation, which has its own unique challenges.a complementary globalization platform:
  - provides a method to store and leverage previously translated content
  - employs terminology control (glossaries) ensuring consistent branding
  - provides visibility and tracking of localization costs
  - coordinates updates of multiple sites across different languages