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