Global enterprises now face a growing need for consultancy in content management (CM). There are more foreign markets and larger volumes of more complex content to consider, and in some cases enterprises still lack localization understanding. In a situation of accelerated globalization, companies have to conquer international markets to defend their position and guarantee growth. Clear and appropriate multilingual information for communication with subsidiaries, partners, investors and customers in each country is essential. This is why a multi-language vendor (MLV) could successfully diversify into global CM consulting.

Today, companies have to create, publish and manage more and more content: user manuals/guides, training manuals and e-learning modules, online help, commercial, legal and internal documents, web sites and so on. These larger volumes of content often mean greater management risks for companies and more problems to solve. Content must, above all else, be appropriate to the local context it is intended for, and therefore it has to be personalized, translated to take account of the specific features of the language and culture of each country, put on the market without delay, and distributed through multiple channels.

Many companies recognize that the translation costs of their company will increase over the coming months and years to respond to growing international demand for their products. However, many struggle to cope with the translation/localization process (which services for which needs and at what cost?) and have difficulty setting up common terminology for the whole company. In addition, most companies have yet to introduce performance indicators in this field. However, being able to control and measure the performance of any activity is essential to proving its value, and it is by measuring performance that improvements can be made.

This increase in the amount of content to be managed means that companies can no longer create documents and have them translated in isolation, by service or product. An overall view of the various services and players in a company is necessary if content is to be managed efficiently and cost-effectively. Some customers rely on their subsidiaries to look after the creation and localization, often for utterly laudable organizational reasons. Yet this has a scattering effect that justifies all the more the fact that companies now need to switch from a one-dimensional monolingual approach to a multilingual, global and centralized approach to managing their content.

To react to market trends and growing demand, companies are increasingly aware that speed is the key to success, but is also the real challenge. With more products, versions and options augmenting the number of people, countries and languages involved, how can companies be sure of maintaining the same time-to-market for their products? With traditional information processing, under pressure of time, companies find themselves having to publish substandard or even out-of-date content, leading to a drop in customer satisfaction and the loss of market opportunity.

According to a recent survey (www.sdl.com, March 2007), eight out of ten companies complain about incorrect translations, but only 37% say they would he prepared to rectify the problem within six months. While we may be right in thinking that the majority of companies are unhappy with the quality of translations of their content, how many of them have actually decided to introduce a solution to make this right? Since global CM is not the core business of companies, they do not necessarily have the skills to put optimized processes and best practices in place. Many recommendations have been made by recognized service providers, but subsequent experience proves that companies rarely implement changes on their own because they lack the time and knowledge to do so.

As a result, all they can do is keep noticing that they are not meeting their commitments in terms of targets for quality, time and deadlines demanded by the launch of their products and services.

An innovative activity is born for MLVs

According to the LISA organization (www.lisa.org), working with globalization consultants can increase profits by about 25% and revenues by 30%, improve service delivery by 65%, and generate savings in direct and indirect operational costs of 45%. A consultancy offer tailored to a company's needs can help clients make the necessary changes to optimize their working processes. In many cases, for example, our clients and prospective clients have asked us to accompany them in the initiative to optimize the entire CM process: creation, localization, distribution and maintenance. It is clear that this is a widespread but largely unresolved need.

More specifically, having worked in localization for 15 years with clients from all backgrounds, we noticed that many companies still had optimization potential in linguistic engineering, which could enable them to avoid common and repeated mistakes, cut costs and save time. Often the managers responsible for all or part of the process are aware of this but lack an overall vision of the state of the art, the human and financial resources, and the ear of their top management to implement change.

How are companies generally alerted to the fact that they need to optimize? If their own stories are anything to go by, the critical indicators are often the same. Customers are dissatisfied, products are not gaining market share or are even losing out to the competition - and don't forget that even 1% loss of market share can mean losses of several hundred thousand euros or dollars. In addition, the company's brand image may not be particularly good, whether among end users or specialist magazines that evaluate products and their documentation. It can also be the case that the number of calls to the company's hotlines rises to an unacceptable level, not to mention the number of hours and amount of resources deployed internally to sort out problems and somehow get a product on the market by the date originally planned.

Genuine optimization of CM and localization is total

Content is supposed to be informative regardless of language. As information becomes an enterprise's raw material, localization and CM should he combined. The majority or content that companies create today will be translated into one or more languages tomorrow and it is therefore necessary to anticipate translation as early as possible in the process. By putting the correct authoring and CM processes in place, companies can optimize translation costs and times.

Optimization is total, that is, genuine optimization is achieved by linking all the stages together - authoring, terminology, translation, distribution, content management.

Overall optimization is a trend affecting all sectors of the industry, and it has already been successfully applied to services such as IT and logistics.

What global enterprises need to know is that localization costs are the highest costs in the whole linguistic chain. Without optimization, in the case of technical documentation, the costs of localization into one language are similar in scale to those of creating the documentation in the first place, while introducing these solutions generates more cost savings for the company the more languages for translation there are.

Optimization can take place on different levels and in accordance with the configuration or the company, but generally, four main areas can be identified that, when linked, enable the company, to gain real control of content, provide a fluid and efficient work organization and see really significant cost savings.

1. Content creation and re-use, and multi channel publication

Authoring in the early stages makes a big contribution to cutting translation costs in the later stages. A simplified version of the language, which avoids high-flown or slangy styles or very marked cultural references, will produce a text that is much easier to translate and much easier to read for the end user. Computer-assisted authoring permits the use of text already written and/or translated for the company.

In addition to controlled language and authoring assistance, emphasize common structuring rules. Introducing an authoring method that is the same for all authors and unique to the company not only cuts the development time of documents but also enables document content to be harmonized.

Writing for internationalization should also be a concern. Has anyone thought about the character encoding (for example UTF-8) to prevent problems displaying certain characters in certain languages? Has sufficient space been left in images to avoid extra work later on at the DTP stage? Does the software support bidirectional text so that languages such as Hebrew and Arabic can be read correctly? Thinking about these things before beginning the document authoring process enables the subsequent steps to be optimized.

The single sourcing repository is where the "write once, publish everywhere" principle applies, as well as the concept of separating the content from the container. The content is stored:

• ideally in XML format because this makes it easier to re-use
• in a single repository in "chunks" and can be easily re-used on demand in the same document or other documents in completely different formats (PDF, Word, XML, HTML, Flash, PPT, QuarkXPress, InDesign and so on). The company loses no time rewriting existing content and saves time on publication tasks.
  

2. Centralized corporate technology

The creation of a company's own corpus of terminology provides a single source of reference for all authors and translators, making their job easier and cutting production times, generating the approval and satisfaction of those who have to validate the text in each country, making easier reading for end users and significantly reducing costs. The terminology helps to improve the final quality of content and generates customer loyalty. It is estimated that the use of a terminology corpus reduces reading times by 50%. The human brain assimilates more quickly if an idea or concept is always expressed in the same way, using the same term.

3. Computer-aided translation

The use or translation memories (TMs) guarantees terminological and stylistic coherence and makes it easier to back-translate. Furthermore, few people are aware that TMs are a company asset that can be depreciated in the accounts, as can terminology databases and style guides.

4. Centralized content management system (CMS) and global translation management system (GTMS)

A CMS lets you create, develop, manage and store a company's content, while a GTMS enables this content to be translated more quickly and at lower cost. It allows TMs and terminology databases to be shared (in-house and externally) across projects and enables manual processes in the translation project management workflow to be automated.

Installing and linking a CMS and GTMS provide a company with a powerful global content management solution (GCMS) to cope with growing pressure from its activities and deadlines. In all cases, the best GCMS is the one that reflects a company's needs and information model.

The final point that sometimes needs to be taken into account in the process is machine translation (MT). It is not designed to replace human translation but to increase translation productivity. For companies with very large volumes for translation or very dynamic online content, the new generation statistical MT may prove excellent for coping with the demand within a particular timescale. Companies that have introduced and optimized every stage in the above process are now able to create their content and have it translated much more efficiently, while providing maintenance and traceability.

Solutions should be adapted to the size and needs of each company.

Introducing best practices also enables clients to benefit from significant improvements. By introducing the right processes and tools for re-using existing content, the time spent rewriting or retranslating can be reduced by 30% to 70%. In addition, by managing content efficiently, the time taken to access documents is reduced significantly and exponentially due to an increase in the production of global content from year to year.

In addition, staff members are no longer performing tasks with low added value, such as copying and pasting text already written and/or translated, and can therefore concentrate fully on their area of expertise, developing at the same rate as the technologies in their field.

By capitalizing on content, re-using existing content and managing tasks automatically, companies can also noticeably improve their direct costs and much more so their hidden costs. Hidden costs, which are often higher than direct costs, are made easily measurable by reliable traceability and reporting functions.

Few companies have so far introduced selected centralized terminology. For many, this method could enable avoidance of common errors in terminology consistency. Similarly, through methods for automatically re-using existing content during authoring and translation, mistakes are repeated much less frequently and text is much easier to read for end users.

Reduction of a product’s time-to-market

Optimization of the time spent on each step in the management of global content and the communication between each of these steps can cut the time it takes to launch a product. This approach allows a switch from the old sequential, linear model of the linguistic chain, which often meant you had to wait for one component to be finished before the next one could be started, to a more modular, dynamic model, where updates and new content can be processed as soon as they are created, thereby reducing the linguistic life cycle, particularly by beginning localization earlier.

Optimization can cut the time-to-market by replacing a linear production model with a more dynamic model.

Quality content has a direct impact on a company's brand image and is one way of standing out from the competition. Quality is key to securing long-term customer loyalty. On the other hand, a poor brand image is difficult to improve.

Since the laws on financial security were introduced, in particular the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, companies have had to guarantee the traceability of their financial operations, which has had an impact on CM. Setting up content traceability also means being able to provide evidence of compliance at any time.

A company that has already optimized the creation of its content and had it translated into the languages of its target markets stands well ahead of the competition. Where this is not the case, companies tend to lag behind the com­petition, missing market opportunities.

These examples illustrate the scale of the challenges when it comes to global CM and the improvements that can be made. Solutions do exist, adapted to the size and needs of each company. Some companies have already developed and implemented best practices and effective processes for deploying them internationally. Optimization is now a necessary step in securing a company's general success. But let us not forget that these benefits can only be enjoyed to the full where optimization is total. Certain conditions must be met to ensure that optimization is a success.

Approach

There is no general solution or magic formula that works the same way for all companies. Every company is unique, functions differently and consequently has different needs. First and foremost, any approach has to take into account the way the company is organized internally and externally, its culture and geographical distribution, and its statutory obligations and development strategy. Regardless of the way the company is configured, the proposed approach must be progressive so that it follows a logical path towards implementation, modular so that it allows the company to take the chosen steps at its own pace and according to its own needs, and independent because only a service provider that does not sell or install tools itself can guarantee objectivity when advising a company. Information management in a business depends not only on technological tools, but also on the complex relationship between people, processes, content and knowledge. Introducing new processes involves change within a company, requiring intervention by a high-level "sponsor" who can impose strategic choices and assemble the necessary finance. Changes may include staff training in new processes and/or tools, reorganization or reallocation of certain positions, and the integration of new technical tools.

Accompaniment of change management may prove necessary in the departments concerned because change is generally the biggest issue due to the apprehension teams may feel. It should be noted that only a strong sponsor combined with effective communication well in advance of the project, involving all those affected within the company, will ensure the success of the process. The choice of a consultancy provider who will accompany the company in the optimization of its content must enable a relationship of trust to be built up in the long term.

For this to happen, the provider must have proven expertise in CM and localization, be neither a manufacturer nor an installer of tools if it is to judge the needs of the company objectively before proposing solutions, guarantee compliance with current standards in the held, to ensure the ongoing interoperability of the company with market players and processes, and carry out the steps towards change progressively.

Consultants can help to improve the quality of the client's experiences and automate the processes and infrastruc­ture of global CM. Depending on what the client wants to achieve, the consul­tant helps to work out which aspects of existing processes can be improved and what changes are involved in making these improvements.

For the consultant, global CM consultancy provides not only the satisfaction of supporting the client in its international success, but is also a fulfilling activity that enables him or her to work on a task from beginning to end. It is a varied job, combining the preparation and conceptualization of tasks and requiring a good knowledge of the ecosystem of tools and solutions on the market.

It should not be forgotten that satis­faction then also becomes measurable for the linguistic service provider, who can work more efficiently once the right processes have been introduced by the client. Having helped the company to work in a more fluid manner, the powerful relationship of trust that develops between the consultant and client is generally a guarantee of a long working relationship between the two. For the enterprise, then, the MLV becomes more of a partner than service provider.

References:

• Ray, Rebecca, ed. Managing Global Content: Global Content Management and Global Translation Management Systems.
• LISA Best Practice Guide. www.lisa.org/Best-Practice-Guides.467.0.html
  

Sandrine Trillaud is an international consultant in global content management at WhP. She worked for 15 years as a project manager in localization and specialized via a master's degree in content management and document engineering.