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