Part 2: Unified Tech and Content Powers Omnimarket Success

Andrew Thomas 06 Nov 2019 4 min read
Intelligent translation

We started this blog series by discussing how intelligent translation can enable the success of your omnimarket strategy. This second entry of our six-part series focuses on one of the five aspects of intelligent translation, being Tech Connected.

Disconnects can kill your global content program and translation strategy. Whether it’s poor communication, manual workflows or missed deadlines, these kinds of pitfalls will ultimately impact localization cost, quality and delivery.

Inefficient and antiquated technology is another major disconnect that can have a big impact. A recent Forrester report revealed that nearly 80% of organizations had not integrated their translation management systems with their content management systems, proving that there’s a lot of work still to be done.

The endless development loop

Incompatible technology solutions introduce several other issues into the localization workflow. A small, seemingly easy task like updating availability in translation management systems, which may need to be done several times a day, can take a linguist 30 minutes. A lack of shared protocols between content management systems (CMS) and translation management systems (TMS) further exacerbates to the problem. To solve the immediate need, customers or language vendors may develop their own connector. Later, as systems are upgraded, there is a risk the connector will not be compatible, so more development is needed. Without realizing it, an endless development loop has been created. There is some hope: To minimize this kind of re-work, Common Sense Advisory recommends that a dedicated solution like the one created by Xillio might be an answer.

Faced with these obstacles, what can be done? Translation management solutions are most beneficial when content is easily accessible. To be successful, organizations must integrate and form a network connecting all content repositories.

Working in preferred existing systems and automatically submitting content for translation rather than manually moving files back and forth, optimizes quality, time to market and user experience. To expedite set up and deployment, TMS solutions with standard out-of-the-box connectors, minimal configuration requirements and options for custom connectors allow the most flexibility and compatibility with existing content systems.

Often less than half of what buyers spend actually goes to language-oriented tasks. Although some overhead is necessary, much of it arises when parties deal with a variety of incompatible systems, according to CSA’s Research Analysis.

Many current integrations and connectors are manual and queued only when a human moves files, which then initiates the translation process. Translation can also be triggered by an event. For example, when a step is completed, such as approving content, the content will be automatically submitted to the TMS for translation. Before long Linguistic AI will make connectors smarter by continuously monitoring repository content in the background. The Linguistic AI then optimizes the process by automatically deciding when to start translation based on deadlines and resource availability.

Save time and resources with intelligent translation

Imagine a green energy company named Solar Flare, who manufactures and distributes solar panels throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. Along with standard marketing collateral, the company maintains an extensive website with support information for distributors and customers. Support bulletins, product datasheets, technical briefs, press releases and updates to existing product documentation are posted on a regular basis in all nine of the company’s standard languages.

Solar Flare has different content types stored across multiple repositories, databases and an internal corporate intranet:
  • Marketing content is stored in a web content management system (WCMS) and digital asset management system (DAM)
  • Technical documentation is stored in a component content management system (CCMS)
  • Support articles is stored in a knowledge-based system (KBS)
All of this content must be translated as Solar Flare serves global markets. Without an integrated translation management solution, Solar Flare will have to manually extract content from each of these different systems, send it for translation and re-import the results into each system - an overhead nightmare. But with the help of SDL’s large selection of connectors and integrations, this entire process can be automated saving time and resources.

Being Tech Connected is one of the highlights of the intelligent translation era. Learn how to further optimize your localization program in our next blog exploring machine-first human-optimized system intelligence.

To learn more about intelligent translation and how it can enable the success of your omnimarket strategy, watch this recorded webinar and follow our blog series.

Our recently launched SDL Language Cloud was specifically designed to address these kinds of challenges.
Andrew Thomas
Author

Andrew Thomas

I’m Andrew Thomas, and I’m a huge geek. I’m also a parent and a poet and endlessly fascinated with technology. I’m passionate about the future and how companies can embrace new ways of creating and delivering knowledge that helps their customers solve problems. From time to time, I like to blog about any or all of these topics.
All from Andrew Thomas