KnowledgeForward

I was having breakfast this morning before going to work to prepare for my telebriefing tomorrow on The Role of Enterprise Content Management in Content Globalization/Localization when I opened my Wall St. Journal (4/28/08 page A1; link) to read that nationalism may be thwarting globalization.  The article by Bob Davis points out that while globalization was supposed to be inevitable (hence the WSJ’s reference to Thomas Friedman’s famous globalization manifesto), nationalism and protectionism seem to be on the rise.

Trade talks are shelved.  Barriers to foreign investment are rising around the world. State-owned companies are expanding, particularly in oil and gas. Public support of immigration restriction is growing in countries from the U.S. to India.

So what do I say tomorrow about the need for IT organizations to get involved in content globalization and localization efforts?  I think I’m still on track in saying that there is a sharp increase in content globalization occurring and that IT can help.  It’s possible that some expansion plans in industries that could be brought under state control (energy and foodstuffs in particular) could be put on hold.  But for other industries, the drivers of IT involvement in globalization efforts that I discuss in my telebriefing are still very relevant.  These include:

• Containing or reducing costs: Whatever degree of globalization occurs, there will be a need to contain globalization costs
• Clarification of central and local control through governance: If power shifts are occurring and barriers are rising between central and local branches, governance takes on increasing importance
• Timing/responsiveness: The uncertainty of the globalization landscape places even more emphasis on an organizations ability to react quickly to changes
• Safeguarding brand image: Increased nationalism means increased attention must be paid to local culture and customs, so proper translation and QA processes become more important for a deeper swath of content
• Improving consistency: As with safeguarding brand image, inconsistent translations will have increased risk of harming the brand
• Need to handle increased complexity: Potential increases in regulation will increase the need for complex workflow that can handle documents based upon content typing

I’m not a politician or economist, so I’m (way) out of my element in predicting what effecting nationalism, protectionism, and a global backlash may have on international relations.  The article isn’t saying the slowdown is definite, but a possibility when certain threads in the news are connected.  But from an enterprise content management perspective I think the globalization storm is looking even more vicious than before.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog

I have a telebriefing coming up on content globalization next week that I wanted to alert you to.  I’m focusing mostly on the role of enterprise content management in globalization and have put in a slide on Web 2.0 impacts on globalization.  It’s for clients only, but non-clients can get an introduction through my podcast series on this topic.

The Role of Enterprise Content Management in Content Globalization/Localization
Globalization is profound, it’s irrefutable, and it’s irreversible.” These words, spoken by General Electric CEO Jeffery Immelt, are a clear signal that the business world acknowledges a globalization wave that is unlikely to subside. But how has this wave impacted information technology (IT)? The authors and owners of content have often been insulated from this storm, but a stark increase in globalization demands is pulling IT in. In this TeleBriefing, Service Director Craig Roth describes how enterprise content management (ECM) processes and technology, from authoring to analytics, can reduce the cost, cycle times, and inconsistencies of localization efforts.

4/29/2008 at 2:00 PM EDT / 11:00 AM PDT / 18:00 UTC/GMT / 20:00 CEST
OR
4/30/2008 at 9:00 AM EDT / 6:00 AM PDT / 13:00 UTC/GMT / 15:00 CEST

Here’s the link to register for this TeleBriefing.

I’m happy to report that response has been strong for my podcast series on content globalization (well over 600 downloads in less than 2 weeks!), which confirms for me that there is real interest in IT for learning more about the intersection of enterprise content management and globalization/localization.

There was also a curious finding in the download stats.  I looked at downloads by part and had assumed part 1 would have the most downloads since people start there and then get distracted, busy, or bored and don’t continue.  On the contrary, part 2 had the highest hit rate (about a third of all downloads).  That’s the “globalization 101 in twenty minutes” one – kind of the quick primer without any real opinions thrown in.  To me this shows the content globalization market is at a very early stage and IT folks are hungry just to get their hands around it and figure out what it is.  And before you smart-aleks say it really shows that no one wants my opinion, the next most popular podcast was #4 (26% of downloads), which is “what IT can and should do …”.

If you didn’t see my previous posting about the podcast series, here’s a link to my blog entry that has links to the podcast pages that have links to the podcasts.  Luckily I don’t pay by the link.  Seriously though, sorry about all the linking but each step provides a bit of additional detail for you.

I’m happy to say that after a whole lot of interviewing, writing, and document reviews in the fall/winter of 2007 my report ECM for Translation and Localization: Raising IT’s Globalization Fluency was finally published at the end of January.  I’d like to thank all the clients and vendors that gave me their time to tell me about what they are seeing from their vantage point on the globalization market and, along with my teammates, gave me their comments during peer review. 

The report is only available to clients of the Collaboration and Content Strategies service, but I’ve also done a series of podcasts and accompanying blog entries that summarize the report.  The podcasts/blog is available for free.  I’ve attached the details and links below.  Please let me know what you think by commenting here or in the blog companion entries.  Enjoy!

What IT needs to know about content globalization, localization, and translation

Part 1: Repeatable content globalization: Ignore it at your peril

The first part of this podcast series describes why globalization, and in particular its impact on content management, is going to be so important for organizations and why information technology and IT departments have a role to play.

     Download: [mp3]   [blog companion]

Part 2: Content Globalization 101 in twenty minutes

In part 2 Craig Roth discusses background information on globalization to assist people coming up to speed on globalization or looking for rationale for our analysis. Part 2 gives a quick overview of topics such as globalization terms, where to find linguistic trend data for a particular region, some important standards for content globalization, and a brief overview of code internationalization.

     Download: [mp3]   [blog companion]

Part 3: Content globalization: Do the big vendors care?

In part 3, Craig Roth dives into what big vendors are doing concerning content globalization and where they really care. And what does vendor support mean to the software market and how will buyers be impacted.

     Download: [mp3]   [blog companion]

Part 4: What IT can and should do

Part 4 describes five things that IT can do about content globalization.

     Download: [mp3]   [blog companion]

CMS Watch reported that

Translation and Content Management vendor SDL has taken a minority stake in privately held Trisoft N.V., a Belgian-based vendor of InfoShare, a component content management system (CCM). There was no fanfare, and in fact no announcement; evidently because it wasn’t a full acquisition, the two companies dispensed with any press release. However, I think it’s a significant move. When it comes to translation information management, XML; and in this case DITA-based XML, can matter. SDL had previously acquired Tridion, a Web CMS that can be used for component content management, early last year.

I think this is a good move by SDL, which has become quite a consolidator of globalization technology.  I haven’t looked at InfoShare before, but buying into the XML-based content management market is prescient of SDL since component-oriented content is very useful for creating content that is going to be translated.

Four factors are compounded to increase the value of component-oriented content:

1. The number of localized variants that the content will be translated into

2. The number of formats that the content will be distributed in

3. The locality of the translation (e.g., needing to retranslate only one section of a document)

4. The frequency with which the content will be changed (thus necessitating retranslation)

When any of these four factors increase, component-oriented content creation starts looking better for any organization creating content that will be localized.  That means translation activities will be easier to track, take less time, make better use of translation memory, and be more consistent.

For the end of the year, Ross Dawson published a map of trends across society in 2007, based on a train system map. I find Ross’s map of trends to be very interesting for what it says (and doesn’t say) about the areas I cover as an industry analyst: globalization, attention management, and portals.

Globalization is dead center in the middle of the trend graph.  It has 3 lines connecting it to anxiety compared to only 2 lines to happiness (or does the yellow train stop there?).  From my point of view though (content globalization) I noticed that the technology line does not connect to globalization.  But the core thesis of my research into content globalization is that the trend is for information technology’s intersection with globalization is rising rapidly due to enabling technology in the form of enterprise content management, XML standards, and component-oriented content.

Attention management is on the chart in the form of “too much information”.  It is shown as tantalizingly close to “resource scarcity”, which would have formed an interesting parallel to water scarcity and to the orange line below (constant partial attention, slowing down).  I happen to think those are inexorably connected to “too much information”.

Portals get interesting placement in the “personalization” hub in the lower left of the chart.  No less than 7 trains run through that hub including on-demand, fragmentation, wisdom of crowds, constant partial attention, and online medical records.

A fourth area I cover, virtual worlds, didn’t seem to get placement.  Unless it’s counted under “escapism”.  Or “boredom” …

John Yunker points out a driver for content globalization (web in particular) that I hadn’t glommed onto:

The weak US dollar is helping companies weather a poor local economy by selling their goods abroad. And this year I’ve noticed a number of companies boosting their Web globalization budgets to expand into new markets or improve their current localized Web sites. All signs point to 2008 being a very busy year for translators and Web localization teams.

I agree and, in addition, I don’t see why this has to be limited to web globalization. I believe all types of content (printed manuals, books, packaging, etc.) will see a similar increase in globalization.

This quote came from John’s top 10 Web Globalization predictions. From my point of view, there’s a key one missing from this list - a shift wherein enterprise IT (often clueless on content globalization until now) becomes part of the solution. John mentions this in a November blog post however, where he says

I believe the changes are due to the simple fact that the translation agencies are no longer leading the industry. The technologists have taken over, and they have a different vision for the future.

By technologists, I’m referring to software vendors, such as Idiom and Language Weaver and Clay Tablet. I’m also referring to the buyers of translation services, buyers who have seen how technology can make their lives easier and want to see their vendors make full use of this technology – from hosted project management software to machine translation.

While linguists focus on the “art” of translation, technologists focus on the “science” of translation.

John feels the machine translation vendors will make out very well due to this trend. True, but I think vendors in all stages of the enterprise content management (ECM) lifecycle will benefit from content creation to content management to analytics.

Localizing web content involves more than just translation. As any number of books (like The Culturally Customized Web Site: Customizing Web Sites for the Global Marketplace), articles, or my upcoming report on content globalization will tell you, getting the cultural nuances just right is critical to make sure you sell your message. To take an extreme example, just consider online dating. ENLASO did. Yes, ENLASO, a localization service provider (LSP), is offering a consulting service for internationalization and localization of online dating websites:

Social Networking and Online Dating Language Solutions

At their heart, social networking and online dating Web sites are very relationship oriented: the “product” is the online customer (or Web site member), who is directly involved in “packaging” and virtually “delivering” personal content to another customer. As a result, localization challenges for such a site are very different from traditional multilingual commercial Web applications. Cost-effectively serving such Web content globally, while preserving individual target locale protocols of interactive dating and romance, requires a highly specialized team.

The tone of communications and standards for appropriate social demeanor in social networking and online dating can be radically different in Asian markets from what is considered the norm in Western markets. Pull down menus with gender and pronouns can prove to be surprisingly complex in some languages.

Many online dating or social networking Web sites have databases of hobbies, professions, memberships, etc. to help flesh out a user’s profile. ENLASO can advise you when additional content (e.g. new professions) are appropriate for new target locales. Our linguistic input will help ensure that your Web site is culturally appropriate for all of your intended locales.

Whether your botched translation and cultural understanding cause damage to your brand, a foreign affairs faux pax, or a serious disconnect on dating expectations, it’s an avoidable mistake. As for the rest of the perils of online dating sites, you’re on your own.

Below is an excerpt from an article in today’s Wall St. Journal (11/1/07 page B3). The article is called “How Netlog Leaps Language Barriers”. It describes how much easier it was for Netlog to translate its web site into multiple languages than it was for MySpace because of proper forethought to the translation process:

Compare that with what MySpace had to do when it wanted to launch in non-Western languages like Japanese and Russian. The site had to rewrite the code of its entire Web site, a Herculean task that took MySpace’s 40 developers six months. “It was pretty controversial internally,” said Travis Katz, MySpace’s managing director for international. “But we thought this was the right thing to do; international growth is the key to our future.”

Turkey is an example of how quickly Netlog can move. In July, Mr. Bogaert decided to launch a Turkish version after noticing that Turkish immigrants living in Germany were congregating on the German site. He found two Turkish exchange students to translate the site. Four months later, the site has 2.5 million users. Mr. Bogaert estimates that it cost about €1,000 to launch.

The article describes the capability Netlog used as “a novel tool the software developers came up with to make the site easy to translate.” It’s not really novel. It’s called code internationalization. As described by Wikipedia “The current prevailing practice is for applications to place text in resource strings which are loaded during program execution as needed. These strings, stored in resource files, are relatively easy to translate. Programs are often built to reference resource libraries depending on the selected locale data.” This is precisely the method used by Netlog.

I see two take-aways here:

• First is the value of moving localization concerns to the beginning of the planning process from the end. By building the content with translation in mind (more specifically, focusing on code internationalization), costs were reduced from 240 man months to 8 and reaction time was improved from 6 months to 4.
• Second is the importance of the business treating globalization as a first-order imperative. Interestingly, both companies seem to treat globalization as critical to their growth (the quote from Mr. Katz is a great example), but only one has pushed that message down to the people doing the work so it can have an actual effect.

This example was related to code internationalization, but it applies just as well to static websites and non-web content. Moving globalization and localization to the beginning of the planning process rather than the end and recognizing globalization as a first-order business imperative are essential for organizations that seek growth outside their home markets.

According to ICANN:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will launch an evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names next week that will allow Internet users to test top-level domains in 11 languages.

“This evaluation represents ICANN’s most important step so far towards the full implementation of Internationalized Domain Names. This will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created,” said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. “ICANN needs the assistance of users and application developers to make this evaluation a success. When the evaluation pages come online next week, we need everyone to get in there and see how the addresses display and see how links to IDNs work in their programs. In short, we need them to get in and push it to its limits.”

The evaluation is made possible by today’s insertion into the root of the 11 versions of .test, which means they are alongside other top-level domains like .net, .com, .info, .uk, and .de at the core of the Internet.

Next Monday, 15 October 2007, Internet users around the globe will be able to access wiki pages with the domain name example.test in 11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.

While it may seem like knowing just enough English to type “.com” is not a problem, the issue is twofold. First, writers of languages with non-Roman alphabets may not have an English keyboard that can type “.com”. They could always copy and paste it from other content when needed, but that brings me to the second point: they shouldn’t have to. The content on the Internet is not owned by the U.S. (even if ICANN is) and being able to use addresses in other alphabets has a great deal of symbolic meaning.

I’m currently researching and writing a paper on globalization due out around January. You’d have to be living under a rock to not understand the impact that globalization is having on the demographics of Internet usage and, accordingly, the web technologies, processes, and cultural sensitivity needed to support them. But the recent statistics were still surprising.

The fall of the Iron Curtain (generally considered to be 1989) began a change in market forces that is still being felt in global businesses. For machine translation, SDL reports that Eastern bloc countries account for seven out of the top 10 fastest growing languages for its translation modules in 2007 (Source: http://www.sdl.com/en/events/news-PR/Eastern- Europe-and-China-dominate-2007-translation- trends.asp). Internet World Stats reports that English is by far the most common language on the Internet (with 365 million users versus 184 million for #2 Chinese), but there has been massive growth between 2000 and 2007 for Arabic (+941%), Portuguese (+525%), and Chinese (+470%). The rest of the world’s languages (outside the top 10) still represent 15% of all internet users and had 440% growth from 2000 to 2007.

In terms of usage, Internet usage outside of North America dwarfs usage within it (see table below), although North America has the highest Internet penetration (69%).

Why ICANN picked Yiddish as one of the 11 languages though baffles me a bit. Couldn’t they have picked something more common, like Hebrew? Oh vey.