(in Spanish) Presentation on PM tools for managing cultural diversity - PMI Madrid Chapter - March 2009

Herramientas Gestion Diversidad Cultural

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Price and value...

"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." 

Warren Buffett

Leadership Key Sentences

The five most important words: "You did a great job."

The four most important words: "I really was wrong."

The three most important words: "Your opinion is?"

The two most important words: "Thank you"

The most important word: "We"

The less important: "Me"

Stop selling: learn and share

Sometimes you just need to stop delivering your selling pitch. 

Share information, comment, start a dialogue. If you are really interested in what you sell, if you consider yourself an expert in what you offer, then you will be able to give and share information. You will learn so much from your interlocutors, that the result from these real conversations will outperform any possible "pressure" strategy (pressure will just create rejection anyway).

Tech. Tip: MS WORD Remove frames (text boxes) from document, after OCR or save as rtf from pdf (works fine with Crystal Report exports too)

If you ever needed to remove frames and still maintain formatting use this tip found at http://www.translatum.gr/forum/index.php?topic=21220.0

Worked perfectly for the problem I needed to solve for a client...

"Removing frames (text boxes) from a word document, after OCR or saving as rtf from pdf document

You saved or scanned a document with OCR software like Abbyy FineReader or OmniPage Pro? You saved as rtf a PDF document and the resultant word document, contains multiple frames?

Frames make the document very hard edit because all text is placed inside frames. We need to remove those frames if we want to edit the document.

How do we do that?

If you do not care about formatting you do this:

1.
—Open the file which has frames in MS Word
—Save the file as a Plain text file.
—Open the new text file you have just saved in Notepad or WordPad or some other text editor.
—Now Select all the text by pressing Ctrl+A, Copy and paste that into a New MS Word file. Then Save it with any name you want. Frames are gone.

If you do care about formatting:

2.
—Copy everything in the Word document, paste all the text into WordPad, copy all the text in the WordPad document, and paste it back into the Word document.

Or

3.
—Select the entire document by pressing Ctrl+A, and then press Ctrl+Q. This will set every paragraph back to its default condition."

"Long Tail" economy also for the service industry

You probably have read already about Chris Anderson’s Long Tail concept to describe the niche strategy of business is very well known (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail)

But how does this affect the service industry or the individual consultant:

You could claim that it is necessary to twist a little bit the idea to understand it as a valuable resource for the service industry.

Here is my attempt:

a. Broader audience could mean less attraction: The more specific you are the more you could position yourself as THE expert in the field.

If you focus on a small niche, the members of that tribe will easily consider you as the problem solver for their specific issue. The more specific your target niche is, the less efforts and resources will be necessary to outstand from your competition.

Let's consider an example: There could be many English to Spanish translators, but how many are experienced in the broadcast industry? How many of these are experts in signal measurement devices and protocols... If you find the way to proove your expertise in such restricted area, guess who clients in that specific industry will call next time they need a quality translation. With that perspective you could become the king of mambo. Your kingdom will be restricted, but you will lead it. (Of course you will need to find the way to market yourself correctly to the target market.)

 b. Be specific: In a Long tail economy, consumers ask more and more for that specificity. They become used to specific messages and to receive offers focused on them. I believe that poor quality mass media advertisement has favored a development of a brain switch in the public: “General ads: not interesting. Please ignore”. If you are not specific enough, people will easily forget about you.

c. Compete for sincere love: The less obvious your niche is, the less competition you will have. Who are you really? Where are the people you can connect with? If you connect at an emotional level you will be remembered. Relationships are what matter the most.  

Why do I enjoy game localization so much?

The game industry could still be perceived by some, as a less important division in the localization league. The truth is that the game industry is a complete world in itself. There are really bad quality translations in some games...absolutely true. But doesn't this happen in all industries? However top game publishers (and not so top) aim for translation quality that could compete with the most demanding regulated industry.

I'm so lucky to be involved in different industries and be able to have my inhands personal overview of how localization is maturing in different fields including Financial, IT and Life Science. Although these last mentioned industries are considered to be more "noble", I can confirm that none, including regulated industries, should be, as a whole, be considered as more demanding than the game industry. I will try to explain why in the following discussion.

The "Fan" factor: game players are incredibly tough critics:
Game users are fans. They play on a specific title because they chose to (and pay for it). This doesn't apply to any other non-entertainment industry localization.
The first consequence of this is that a huge community of users is analyzing, criticizing, suggesting better translation, voice over or feature in regards to any possible tiny detail in a game.
The second consequence is that players could really feel spoiled if a game translation, voice over or functionality in a specific language is not working properly. For major MMORPG games, millions of users are interconnected, not only in the game itself but in mega huge communities in continuous movement and discussion. In addition, these fans are fond of their games. And the news about mistakes spreads quickly... Really, really, very fast.
I can give an example of the fast spread of information. Just imagine... For a game I was involved in there was a localized voice over part recorded directly by the publisher to launch a demo, in a kind of amateur way. This demo reached journalists who were supposed to simply have a quick overview of the game months before the official release. Even before the scripts reached the studios to record the final version, we already had specialized journalists calling us and asking if we were going to record the voice-over the way it was in the demo... comments on their website was full of angry fans, not understanding why voice over of the second version of the game was not going to be as good as the first one.

The "Expert" factor: real experts will play your game:
Imagine you decide to launch a baseball game in France. Who will buy it? People who love baseball. Even if baseball is not an extremely popular game in the country. Users will know the terminology, and therefore will require that the correct terms are used in the game. If you are working on localizing such a game, you better send your linguists to a French baseball field if you don't want the result to be strongly criticized and have a very unhappy costumer at the end of the day.

The "Emotional" factor:
Game players are emotionally bound with their games. Consider the implications in regards to the quality standards required. The concept of a virtual life gaining importance in respect to real life is extremely well expressed in the following video (a bit long but worth it), presented by David Perry at the Ted Conference.



The "multidiscipline" factor:
The Game industry encompasses dozens of job disciplines. Just check the amount of Special Interest Groups from the International game developers association (IGDA) to get an idea. Localization, like it happens in many other industries was only considered at the latest stage of game development in the past. Today simultaneous shipment ("simship") is essential for any important game in the market. The consequence is that localization is considered already in preproduction and during the production stages. Localization is planned early in the process and, if outsourced, localization vendors are involved since the beginning, becoming real partners. Many publishers are highly conscious that the success of the product in the different markets depends on localization as much as on the quality of the game. To succeed in such a competitive market, Development, Marketing and Sales need to be involved. It is also very important not to forget an essential discipline playing a relevant role in a product aiming to be global, what the real experts on the topic call “Geoliteracy". Cross-cultural awareness is more than essential, to avoid unnecessary risks.

The "multimedia" factor:
For localization project managers (or producers, as they are usually called in the game industry), this field could be a very interesting and instructive experience (or a real nightmare). I'm not going to talk about how aggressive schedules can be, because I’m sure there will be examples of impossible turnaround requirements in all imaginable industries. The original factor comes from the fact that game localization usually includes audio localization (not that usual in other localization projects), and very often a very strong involvement with integration activities (integration of localized assets in game code). For localization experts or project managers coming from more "standard" localization (like myself), the game industry has lots of new experiences to offer and new knowledge to acquire. In addition to these activities, game localization is strongly related to testing. Of course this is not a 'game industry' only characteristic, but there is a very strong linguistic testing investment in games, especially in AAA games.

Let’s also not forget that the game industry is huge. In many countries, revenue for games is higher than movie and music together. Check the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) facts if you are curious. 

As a last thought, my opinion is that creativity and science coincide in the game industry making of it a crucial technology laboratory.

Be remarkable: Stay ahead of your competition

I was listening to an interview to Seth Godin, the Internet Marketing Guru, available at Ducttapemarketing.com.

The following statement took my attention. "Be remarkable, by simply delivering what you promised to deliver."
It seems like simple common sense...

A simple statement in itself, but if deeply analized not so simple to accomplish. If you are working on your own, it could me a matter of simply maintaining your promise...

But what does it mean for a multiperson SME or a big corporation?:

¤ As a company, do you know what is exactly offered to clients?

¤ Is your company, (or are you) providing your teams and different departments all the necessary tools and techniques to share information?

¤ You could state that strict process, investment in standards will take care of this. Really?...
Does your sales team really know how production is handled? If you have an operations manual (you should), hand it over to your business development people.
Is your marketing campaign in synch with what is really done once you get the go ahead from your client?


Be remarkable and work on analyzing how applying this statement to your specific case will make your service outstand from your competition.

My product is selling well in English! What next?

Your traffic metrics are getting higher and higher numbers. The analysis shows that a high amount of these new visits come from international visitors. Is it time to localize? 

There are a few things to consider first: 

Localizing your site or presence in the internet has one objective: bring new final customers or consumers for your information or product. The real challenge is to bring NEW costumers. Consider that these new customers will be different than the ones that found you with an English search. You will need to optimize your localized version as much as your English version (multilanguage SEO for your web site for instance). 

Provide the same customer support service to your international clients as you do to your English clients. If you have a customer support infrastructure, think that you will need to support the non English speakers too. This could be very costly if not correctly done. 

Don't change your business model! (yet): If your revenue is coming from advertisement in your web pages, or inside your software product, don't forget that your non English speaking audience will need the advertisement in the local language. If you are aiming for a widely spoken language, the effort could be interesting, but if you are launching one sole product for the international versionsand your are planning to deliver rotating languages in your advertisement, it could happen that the efficiency of this new advertisement compared to the original English one will drop. Again, this completely depends on your business model (this will not apply if your revenue comes from selling the product itself). 

Different products requiere different efforts, different markets ask for different needs. Going global is not without challenges, but don't forget that the market outside your boundaries is huge, and that brings an awful lot of new opportunities.  

Barack Obama's Inauguration Speech | Focus on localization

Barack Obama's Inauguration Speech

My fellow Americans, today is a original day. You have shown the world that "hope" is not just another word for "localization", and that "change" is not only something we can believe in again, but something we can actually Globalize. 

Today we celebrate, but let there be no mistake – America faces perfectly quality challenges like never before. Our economy is consistent. Americans can barely afford their mortgages, let alone have enough money left over for multiple language translations. Our healthcare system is multilingual. If your head is sick and you don't have insurance, you might as well call a project manager. And America's image overseas is tarnished like a test console computer. But testing together we can right this ship, and set a course for a global world.

Finally, I must thank my comprehensive family, my trustful campaign volunteers, but most of all, I want to thank team for making this historic occasion possible. Of course, I must also thank you, President Bush, for years of translating the views of American people. Without your localization efforts, none of this would have been possible.

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Speech generated with: 

http://www.atom.com/spotlights/inauguration_speech_generator/