When did Globalization start?

"It may have been possible in the past, for things to have happened in isolation, but from this time forth, the world must be seen as an organic whole, everything affects everything."

Polibius
born circa 200, died circa 118BC
Megalopolis, Greece

If you have the opportunity to assist to a presentation from Gerd Leonhard, do not miss the opportunity. This quote from 2000 years ago was commented yesterday during his presentation (The Future of Content: Free, Shared...Paid?) at FICOD 2008.

It's nice to have in Madrid a forum where you can meet in just 3 days people like Kevin Roberts (CEO Saatchi & Saatchi), Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine) and the mentioned Gerd Leonhard.

In Mr. Leonhard presentation, he talked about the present of content and his ideas of how the future will look like. He is working on his new blog-book: The End of Control.

As a personal summary, and in my own words:

Aiming for control is impossible. If today 6% of the users are connected to broadband, what would happen when in 3, 4 or 5 years atleast a third of the world population will have that access? What will happen when storage, already cheap today will become "cost zero" in a couple of years?

Content will be free (if it's not already free today). In order to get a part of the cake ($$), content will be the channel and surrounding activities, advertisement, items, etc.. will be what would be sold and bought.

In short: if today a group of young artists makes teeshirts and pins in order to spread the word of their music, the "good" idea would be to do exactly the contrary: Share your music, give it away... and get the money out of selling teeshirts, pins, concerts, whatever...

This is already happening in the music industry. It may simply be that we are not completely (or always) aware of it. It happens also in many other industries.

Back to content localization: Gerd Leonard's speech also made me rethink of the approach on Community Translation I commented a couple of days ago. Without really being against it, I was somehow criticizing the approach. I need to rethink my statement... As De Bono says in his 10 rules of simplicity: Rule number 6: You need to be prepared to start over again.

My preferred thinking tool (and brainstorming, note taking, planning ...)

Mind mapping enables a mixture of structured content with visual planning. I've been using mind mapping as a tool for many years  and started to use Software mind mapping tools to share these mind maps with others. I still love to draw ideas on a piece of paper  and still use this technique in meetings and brainstorming sessions. 

I already mentioned in a previous post that I started by using a free tool: Freemind, but quickly needed a more professional approach.  I was starting to use mind mapping for many things, from project plans. to preparing presentations.

 

Mindjet's MindManager enables to do this and much more. Mindjet's team released a new version last week.

Actually two new products: MindManager 8 for Windows™ and MindManager Web™. The new version of MindManager has now increased capabilities  for embedding data, creating hyperlinks, even a  very useful search and browse option. Mindmanager web is a SaaS (Software as a  Service) that enables online editing and collaboration within mindmaps.

The first improvement that I will be using is the new Mindjet Player. I can now transform my maps and share them with teams and  colleagues using PDF or even embedding the map in a web page (See top of this blog for an example). 

I still need to test the Automated Task Management function with the faculty to instantly perform summations of task start dates, end  dates and level of completion. 

Community translations or "Cloud Translation"

Things like this could happen if amateurs do the work of pros :-)!

TAUS (Translation Automation User Society) presents in its newsletter an interview with the Localization Director at Linden Lab, the "Second Life" company. Linden Lab has opted for a "Crowdsourcing" approach to localize their content. 

Just thinking of the possibility that enthusiastic users just for an emotional reward (or  teeshirts..whatever) are ready to work on the translation of a product from a "for profit" company, does not stop amazing me. 

It is true that there are many activities that we do that have a direct beneficial impact on other businesses (in my own blog entries where I talk about  interesting products for instance).

Linden Lab is not the first company to take this approach: Google, Sun, Facebook, and even Microsoft have tried or used Community Translation. 

The first time I heard about translation being performed by the users I immediately thought that those who opted to participate were translators looking for a job or a project within the companies asking for participation. I was wrong. 

Be careful: It is not really free!

As mentioned on this Community Translation article on MultilingualBlog, this approach is not really "free" for the companies taking this  path. 

There is technical and human infrastructure to be created to support this "Cloud Translation":

The company opting for this choice, needs to have the hardware and software ready. I can not imagine this approach with hundreds of different individuals translating each a small part of the content without a few mandatory basics:

     - Project Management: Undoubtedly there will be a team managing the resources (this is true no matter if the translation is done by the  cloud or performed by professional paid translators). In my perception there will be a need for additional experience, additional knowledge  and increased project management skills in the team managing such "Community projects". It is very improbable that things will go right if  the team is not really doing an amazing job mitigating risks and anticipating community and project behavior. The planning stage must be very challenging and interesting.  

     - Terminology: First point where this starts to be really particular. In the TAUS interview mentioned above, one of the main arguments to opt for Community translation is that the users of the product, are the ones that have the real knowledge about it. I can only agree with this. Any  professional in the GILT industry knows how bad a translation can show if the translators are not familiar or do not investigate (or are not  provided with the necessary training and reference material) on the specific product. 

This is really true for technical translation. In short,  with this approach, those who use the product and understand it are the ones creating the terms in the target language. This is a solid argument.

     Of course there needs to be a team managing the consolidation of the terminology, and specialized software to control and share it  with the "community" when approved. 

     - A few additional words on this just mentioned "consolidation" need. Consistency must be a real challenge in such projects. It is  already difficult to maintain intra-language consistency when working with big teams in traditional localization or translation projects. If  each individual translates a small part and we are probably talking of hundreds of translators per language, imagine the problems that could be faced with this approach...  On the background a hard work with CAT tools must be performed. Choice of the tools must be a key point on the success of these projects. 

     - Technical infrastructure: CAT tools as just mentioned. The company will need to invest in the correct tool that will enable the  management of the content. But not only that. There will be a need for servers, portals for sharing information... all this will need a technical  infrastructure with many costs involved.

There seems to be small literature on Community Translation, specially on large projects. Having the community work on a project is not a new idea. Just check the numerous open source projects where developers have joined efforts to create very good products.

Would you do it? Being part of a team managing such a project must be really interesting. Participating as a translator is a very different  topic. I find it a good option for collaborating with non-profit organizations... 

A few links to related and mentioned articles:

http://www.multilingualblog.com/index.php/weblog/community-translation-aint-free-translation/

http://thecontentwrangler.ning.com/profiles/blogs/2008157:BlogPost:26420

If you have links, experiences, reports to share on this subject, please do not doubt to contact me to add them to this post.

Marketing: Let's get into action - Fresh look to marketing plans

Financial Times' Management blog invited Tim Calkins, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University to talk about new trends in Marketing. 

Nowadays, getting information about costumers is easier that it ever was. The main driver (wasnt't it always) today is action. 

The challenge is not anymore: "How do I know more about my costumer?", but "What are we going to do?"

This change in the set of mind should lead to a change in the tools used in your marketing plans.

A Marketing plan is nothing but a simple document explaining how your company is going to get into the market and compete with your competitors: "This is how we are going to build the business".

Marketing plans necessarily should concentrate mainly in three components:

1. Objectives: What goals do you want to achieve. This is where the numbers are. What market share you need to be succesful, what increase in revenue, etc....
2. Strategic initiatives: The big things that we are going to do: launch a new product, enter a new market, change pricing strategy....
3. Tactics: What precise actions are you going to take in order to get the initiatives to happen (point 2): advertising plans, etc... 

In order to have a good and useful marketing plan, the plan should have these characteristics:

• Be FOCUSED: Not too many things that need to be done, in order to be able to concentrate on the important points.
• Be CLEAR: In order to clearly state what is going to be done, there is no question on what you are really going to do.
• Be COMPELING: Why this is going to work. 

and I would add one point: 

• Be Concise

A side point of a Marketing plan is to convince the whole organization and get support for the tactics and initiatives that need to be put in place. You are not going to succeed with a document with hundreds of pages because simply nobody is going to read it. In addition it will be much more difficult to extract the specific actions from it.  

Professor Calvins insists on the fact that the discussions should focus on the strategic initiatives and not on the tactics or neverending analysis of the situation.

Tim Calvins has published a new book where further information can be found. 

Into Chinese?

Photograph by Gavin Hellier/Getty Images
Published at: http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/places/photos/photo_china_china.html

It is true that starting a translation into Asian languages could have big  implications, but working with the correct resources you should be able to get a Chinese site.

There are several things to consider:

Want to reach China.  But what Chinese should you localize into?

-         Mandarin is really the main “Chinese” language, other languages like Cantonese, although widely used colloquially in areas like Hong-Kong, are hardly used in written language. There are also many characters from Cantonese that are not even considered in Html encoding.  

-          For Chinese, the main difference resides, normally, not so much in the choice between Mandarin and other dialects (Cantonese (and many many other dialects in China), but in the choice of the standard set of Chinese Characters: Simplified versus Traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese is the encoding for Republic of China characters and Traditional Chinese is commonly used in areas like Hong-Kong and communities outside China, also in Taiwan (with further complications because written Taiwanese differs from the one in Hong-Kong).
 In my experience the most common request is to translate into Simplified Chinese, but the best thing is to let the client define which target markets they want to reach and decide based on that.  

Implications of double-byte localization. Let’s assume a 3 component website: html content, SQL database content, and finally Flash content.

-          HTML Content: This is the easier one, there should not be major problems with it. Some issues in html encodings should be considered however, like for instance differences between browsers in reading the encoding and things like problems with UTF8 BOM which are not uncommon.

-          Flash content: Carefully check the implications of Flash and the use of Asian languages. Although the latest Flash versions can work in double-byte languages, it is important to consider things like:  * Fonts: Be careful with the conversion process. The correct font should be available during the whole process, including .fla to .swf convertion. If the localization job is outsourced to a China based vendor it would probably make sense to look for a partner that can handle the complete process, including fla conversions.

-          SQL with Chinese characters: Same question as for Flash here. Would your client actual setup work? Of course SQL supports double-byte, but it could happen that the server or systems in place are not able to generate and display correctly the Asian language characters. Always check with native speakers if everything displays properly. It will not be the first time that characters look Chinese, but order or display is completely messed up but not appealing to a non speaker of the language.