I read a very interesting blog from Forrester today, looking at how our future will look in terms of the 'Era of Experience'. We are all aware of how the internet is growing but are we aware that the future could involve full body gesture control, voice control and face recognition - in order for us to operate all sorts of devices?

The Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 uses PrimeSense technology - take a look at the video at the bottom of the page showing how you will be able to point at a screen in order for it to do the things you want to, get information that you'd normally plan to search the web for - everything is integrated and interactive.

Thoughts? Pretty cool stuff. My traditional head also thinks, hmm a bit intrusive and you can never focus on one thing, but hey, that's the way our minds have to develop now - to digest lots of different pieces of information from different places and we have to learn to focus in on what is relevant to us. This is also of course a demo and you will do as much or as little as you want in the future.

And why it is relevant to this blog - it's all about information - how we find it, how we use it and how prospects and customers in the future will want to engage with the companies they buy from..

Terry Lawlor, VP Product Management at SDL Language Technologies, shares his thoughts , experiences and vision as SDL Language Technologies launches the latest version of SDL Global Authoring Management System.

[TOM] Hi Terry, we’re talking today about the latest release of SDL Global Authoring Management System. What’s so significant about this release?

[TERRY] What is great about this release is that we have some really exciting new features for technical communicators all around the globe. We’re putting quality and power at your fingertips, with ‘as-you-type’ technology and we are enabling you to work at the publication level, with groups of topics or documents, rather than just a the topic or document level. These features will help writers improve productivity, quality and consistency as well as helping organizations bridge the gap between technical communication and translation.

[TOM] Great, so what are the new features we should be looking out for?

[TERRY] Well, the feature I am most excited about is AutoSuggest. This is a brilliant piece of technology that offers content creators ‘as-you-type’ suggestions of previously written content. It’s akin to the predictive text function we have for writing SMS on our mobile phones, but a lot more powerful! It’s a fantastic feature for technical communicators to help improve consistency and reduce content volumes. Also, as we are seeing an increase in non-native writers located in all corners of the globe, this will help them write according to your house style by offering them previously written sentences. Even if they do not use any suggestions, seeing how content has been written before is a great learning tool for new writers.

[TOM] And does this have any benefits for the ‘global’ nature of documentation?

[TERRY] Of course, that is a core focus of the technology  – we want everything we do to take into account the fact that documentation is going to be translated or, at the very least, read by a non-native speaker. That’s why the technology is called SDL Global Authoring Management System and that’s also why the AutoSuggest technology is based on the same ‘as-you-translate’ technology from our translation tool, SDL Trados Studio. It accesses content that is taken from a translation memory so that the ‘as-you-type’ suggestions are sentences that have not only been written before, but also translated before. This means it will cost you less to translate.

[TOM] Excellent, it’s definitely important to consider the whole content lifecycle from creation through to translation and publishing in multiple languages. What else is in this new release?

[TERRY] There are many improvements, but one of the other key features is the Multiple Document functionality. With SDL Global Authoring Management System you can check your documents against style guide rules, terminology and previously written content as well as create reports on quality levels and the cost of translating documents. Before, you could only check single documents, but now we’ve created the Multiple Document feature you can check and report on complete publications made up from groups of files, such as FrameMaker books, or collections of topics if you are writing in XML or DITA. It will definitely be a very valuable feature for writers, editors and reviewers, especially when working with topic-based authoring techniques.

[TOM] So, how do you decide on the new features to develop in new releases of SDL Global Authoring Management System, and other Language Technologies products?

[TERRY] We are always looking at the long-term market needs, as well as taking a lot of guidance from our existing customers. With our ideas.sdl.com community, anyone can suggest new ideas and functionality for future releases of all of our products, and their peers can vote on them. We then take the most important ideas forward into development wherever possible. We also monitor how the global content industry is changing with a number of annual surveys and use this data to feed back into our products. Also, as we develop our roadmap we share it with our existing customers to get their feedback and to help us steer in the right direction with our technology.

[TOM] And what direction do you think the global content industry will take in the near future? How will global authoring technology help us overcome the next challenges we face?

[TERRY] The amount of content created is growing exponentially. As we become even more of a global community based around the web, the need to think ‘global’ right from point when content is created is more important than ever. The advances in machine translation are also key to how we write content—SDL Global Authoring Management System includes linguistic rules that are specifically designed to ensure you get maximum yield from machine translation.

Also, with content being created by multiple different writers, including your partner community and customers, it becomes more complex for global organizations to manage the quality and consistency of that content. So, global authoring will have to take into account all those different content creators and how their content can be leveraged, improved and created more efficiently. Specifically within the technical communication industry, structured content in DITA and XML and personalization of that content is rapidly becoming the ‘norm’ and being adopted by organizations worldwide. With structured and personalized content offerings from our Structured Content Technologies division combined with SDL Global Authoring Management System, SDL can offer significant value to those global organizations that are looking to adapt to the future of technical communication.

[TOM] Thanks Terry for your insight and sharing of the new features of SDL Global Authoring Management System 2010.

Terry Lawlor is Vice President of Product Management in the Language Technologies Division at SDL, with responsibility for the creation of innovative, high-quality and easy-to-use products that meet customer requirements. He delivers on the vision for language technology products within the overall SDL vision for Global Information Management.

Technical communication is changing. The mere fact that technical authors are now called ‘communicators’ means that product documentation should not only describe how to use and work with products, but it should communicate its message clearly and concisely. As consumers of buckets full of information about the products we use, we want to find the right information and understand it as quickly as possible. Consistency and quality of information is king.

And when I talk about ‘we’, I mean the global ‘we’. With products being available worldwide, ‘we’ are an engineer from Hyderabad, we are a student from Shanghai, or a web designer from Kiev. We need the information we read to be in our own language and, again, not compromising on consistency and quality.

So, it sounds pretty simple: just write it, translate it, publish it and hey presto Mr Web Designer from Kiev has his product documentation in his language and he’s happy. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The quality of the translation is only as good as the original content. And in the world of global business, good quality source content is hard to achieve with technical communicators located all around the globe, many of whom do not write in their native language. What global businesses need is to ensure style, consistency and quality globally while keeping control of the cost of translating their product documentation.

At SDL, our technology – SDL Global Authoring Management System – addresses this pressing need for global businesses. The technology is used by technical communicators and editors around the world to ensure they adhere to company style guides, corporate terminology, grammar guidelines and reuse previously written and translated content. All this helps reduce editing time, improve quality, consistency and accuracy, control translation costs and train new writers. A great deal of benefits from a great piece of technology.

Today, we are announcing the launch of the latest 2010 version. This version comes with a handful of great new features including the ‘as-you-type’ AutoSuggest™ technology and Multiple Document Processing.

Join the webinar to see the technology in action (US time here, Europe/Asia time here). You can also read more about what these new features mean in our interview blog with Terry Lawlor, VP of Product Management for SDL Language Technologies.

It's been a couple of weeks since I have posted, but I am back! I thought I would share with you a presentation that I gave on our recent 'Thought Leadership' webinar series in Language Technologies. I was asked to talk about 'Quality, not Quantity' in relation to the content we create and translate today.

The timing of the webinar was particular apt as it was on the day that we announced the acquisition of Language Weaver. Exciting times at SDL and even more reason to be talking about quality.

Our recent machine translation survey suggested that despite machine translation being high on the agenda for global companies, 75% of them consider 'concerns about quality' to be the main barrier to adoption. So, we need to be thinking about how we overcome those quality concerns. There are many ways to improve quality of machine translation output, including training an engine and using post-editing. But my favourite way to do it is to look at the source content and the techniques we can use, especially in technical communication, to gear content towards machine translation.

I've written a couple of previous posts in these areas that go into more detail, but for now I'll leave you to browse my slides from my recent webinar:

Last week, SDL acquired Language Weaver, the pioneer of statistical machine translation for use by commercial and government organizations. Read more about the acquisition.

On 20th July you can enjoy a rare opportunity to hear the two CEOs, Mark Lancaster and Mark Tapling, speak on a live webinar about the acquisition and the SDL vision for the future of Language Weaver.

Join Mark Lancaster, Group CEO of SDL and Mark Tapling, CEO at Language Weaver to learn:

• Why machine translation is important
• What it means to the language industry
• How global business can benefit

Register now for the webinar on Tuesday 20th July at 8am PDT/11am EDT/4pm BST/5pm CET. 

Jeremy Harpham, Senior Product Marketing Manager writes: We are entering a new era for machine translation. Today SDL announced the acquisition of Language Weaver, the pioneer of statistical machine translation.

Machine translation is a vital part of the corporate and government battle against increasing content volumes and rising customer expectations of being treated and communicated to as an individual. Increasing numbers of organizations are discovering the benefits of machine translation as part of a fully integrated translation process.

Many of you may have read about the news today at SDL – we announced the acquisition of Language Weaver. I have been at SDL for 5 years now and can look back at a series of successful acquisitions by SDL which now complete the vision of having all the pieces to help companies manage content and deliver it in the right language and in the right format for their customers – Global Information Management. The picture is complete. Let's look at some of the key acquisitions over the last 5 years, how they have been so successful and how SDL has changed the game in managing content and language.

Today at SDL we have announced the acquisition of Language Weaver. This is a very strategic and important move for SDL and Language Weaver. The internet is generating more and more content that needs to be managed, optimized and translated. And yet, most companies still translate less than 50% of their overall content. Most of the content on the web is still in English – probably about 80% and yet this will change and only 20% will be in English in a few years’ time.

Machine translation, as part of an overall strategy for managing multilingual content that we call Global Information Management, is the solution to that problem. And so today, SDL is announcing the acquisition of Language Weaver, the pioneer in Statistical Machine Translation (SMT).

The combination of both companies will help further drive machine translation and form an integral part of SDL’s vision for managing global content. SDL sees that the market will grow by cross-leveraging SDL and Language Weaver customers as well as technology and increasing customer choice to translate content more quickly. SDL also looks to grow the foothold that Language Weaver has in government. SDL’s strength in the commercial business arena will also be a benefit for Language Weaver.

Find out more about this acquisition – sign up to a webinar with Mark Tapling, CEO Language Weaver and me, read the press release, an FAQ document and more..

We all use our personal experiences in our day-to-day working lives but sometimes that can misguide us. Let's take people's perception of machine translation technology as an example.

For many individuals their experience is limited to the freely available machine translation services available from websites like www.freetranslation.com and Yahoo! Babelfish. These machine translations are often only good enough to get an idea (also referred to as "gist") or basic understanding of the original content. This is because the machine translation engine is only working at a general language level.

We all know that the use of the internet is increasing. The volume of content that is now available on the internet is growing and so does the challenge of managing that content, analyzing it and making sure it is in the language of the person reading it. The internet is fundamental in the western world’s business operations and access to it is imperative to operate in today’s global business environment.