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Location: Language Technology Center: Articles: Guest Article: Got Integration?

This guest article was authored by Ben Martin, Director of Business Architecture at Flatirons Solutions.

Blended Content and Language Technologies Deliver on Reduced Time and Better Experience

In today’s competitive global market, it is not just who gets there first but who gets there first and delivers a superior customer experience. So while speed to market is still an imperative, harmonizing the experience of the customer, including content deliverables, is the key differentiator. English bleed-through in localized product content, in-country web pages that are only in language at one level of the site, out-of-synch content where training materials are half English and half in language, or the translation of a term varies depending on functional group all result in a jolting experience for the customer and signals a half-baked corporate strategy.

Using Technology to Achieve Faster Time-to-Market, Reduced Cost, and Improved Quality

To achieve the speed to market and harmonize the customer experience, organizations need to enlist an integrated set of technologies to aid their efforts. Just employing decent writing guidelines is not enough to optimize the product deliverables for translations. There are relationships that need to be managed across product deliverables so that change can be synchronized across languages. Mechanisms using workflow and parent-child relationships are necessary to manage parallel universes of websites, documentation and training. Understanding relationships of the product content to the product (for example, strings in the software interface or link titles on your website) can augment that ever elusive simultaneous shipment of product to all the markets.

An often overlooked content/language management tool is a terminology management utility. Too often, terminology management is relegated to a translation productivity tool. Consequently, the organization is not in a position to stem the tide of new words that describe the same thing over and over. It only provides a snapshot of uncontrolled variations. When properly put to use, a terminology management system should be the vetting system for insurgent lingo and confusing “synonyms.”

Web metrics reveal the power of an optimized terminology for searching. Companies are made and lost on how they surface in a web search. An ambiguous, scattershot set of terminology will find you on the 15th page of 16 pages of hits. The days where terminology management is a back-office translation productivity tool are over. Companies must step up to a managed vocabulary that is synchronized across the product content throughout the product lifecycle.

A mishmash of translation memories (already translated sentences) is often spread across current and former translators’ desktops and managed in silos per translation vendor, resulting in a diluted brand and compromised messaging. The greater linkage you can achieve between your translation memory tool and your authoring environment, the greater chance you have of achieving better source and cleaner translations. The more you can centralize and manage one set of memories, the greater efficiencies and consistencies you will achieve. A centralized translation management system that warehouses core linguistic assets can serve as a resource for the enterprise, put the reins of control back in the hands of the business owner, and help identify opportunities for better leveraging of content. This linkage can not only improve the quality of content but accelerate the time-to-language factor.

Metadata Management

Another content management offering that optimizes management of your translations is a metadata management tool that helps an organization single-source their metadata or corporate taxonomy. This tool should manage in one place a consistent set of categorization (taxonomy) and hierarchy of concepts and terms that apply to all content. Too often, departmental content solutions grow up in silos and their tagging strategies are not coordinated, so a two character code in one system might be the same thing as a three-character code in another system. What needs to happen is “meta management” across all systems using metadata.

This allows for a federated view over the systems and a way to synchronize change to the information architecture. This taxonomy needs to migrate to all language sites and content stores. Allowance needs to be made for translation of language-dependent metadata values. For example, the values for job role would need to be translated for each language but the values for document type could remain in the source language. Ensuring that you have a mechanism for stamping your target language deliverables with core corporate metadata will streamline queries and unify your treatment of product content worldwide.

Eliminating Manual Handoff Procedures

Taking advantage of automatic workflows to trigger translation processes will eliminate a lot of manual handoff procedures (which are, by their nature, more prone to error). A “translation-aware” system invokes a number of “cloning” processes at a stage in the lifecycle of the content (topic, group of topics, book) where the owner declares that it has been sufficiently edited and is ready for translation. At trigger time, the Content Management System (CMS) kicks off a process for creating the parallel lives of the content; essentially creating stubs where the translated content is maintained. Creating these stubs includes building out a mirror image of the source content, re-creating linking within the language equivalent, as well as inheriting the metadata from the parent. At the time of creating the stubs, the system adds additional metadata (such as language code). The stubs maintain their relationship to the parent with a based-on relationship.

Once all that work has been done by the CMS, there is the option for a production resource to trigger a build package routine where the system gathers up all relevant stubs to be translated, creates a collection of files by language, and then passes these collections off to a translation management system that analyzes the content, pre-translates it (i.e., substitutes 100% matches with the already translated sentence), reports on the matches and the net new content, and then routes it to the correct resources based on language code and automatic assignments. Once the translation process is complete, the reverse needs to occur, where the translated content is ready to replace the CMS “stubs” and be available to the enterprise as a finished-goods language asset.

The software industry’s efforts in the realm of content and translation management have been slow to provide interoperable handoffs that meet enterprise integration and scalability requirements. Often, companies are left to build out the integrations themselves but, even then, applying automated integration at optimum process “handoffs” delivers a demonstrable ROI.

Conclusion

To get there first and achieve consistency and quality, enterprises need an integrated technology suite that supports the multi-lingual content supply chain. There is a certain glass ceiling that organizations hit when optimizing process without the aid of technology. The biggest gains await those who take advantage of the integrations of their content and language technologies and achieve a holistic set of deliverables by enlisting a holistic set of tools.

About Flatirons Solutions http://www.flatironssolutions.com/

Flatirons Solutions Corporation provides consulting, systems integration, systems and software engineering, and program management services to corporate and government clients. The company offers air traffic management, systems engineering and solutions, analytics, digital asset management, business process automation, XML publishing, and content management solutions.

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