A few weeks ago I gave a short presentation at the W3C conference in Pisa, on some ideas for managing the multilingual web. I thought I'd share some of these with you, plus if you want to, you can watch the 15 minute recording of the presentation for some more detail. These tips answer the following 3 questions:

• How do you maintain global brand consistency on your website, while allowing local people to ensure the site is relevant for their local markets?
• How can you make sure that some of the banners and information you are offering is relevant and targeted to different people that come to your site and their specific needs?
• How can you ensure you have an efficient process for ensuring the content on your website is translated into all the languages you need to communicate in?

And my 3 answers:

• Move to a component-based model for writing content - instead of writing in pages on the web, write in topics of information which your customers can easily search on, which can be managed centrally and which provide a framework and guidance for what can be changed by regional offices and what has to remain in line with corporate requirements
• Use targeting and personalisation - these days, the information stored about users is quite sophisticated and you can use that to make sure that things like banner ads, offers etc change depending on the person that comes to your site, where they come from and their own requirements. Find out more 
• Combine web content management with translation management - You can link your web content management system to a translation management system, so that when content is changed, it can automatically be sent off through the workflow of translation, have language technology applied, be sent to the relevant translators and reviewers and come back into your web content management system

There is of course much more, like looking at the cultural elements and having regional experts do that, to ensure content is relevant, as well as specific details in content management, but these might give you some things to think about initially.

Today SDL announced the acquisition of Calamares, a Media Management Company! It's exciting news as we have for a while seen the growth in the use of videos and other media among corporations. In today's world of increasing amounts of information, we have less time or patience to sit and read words or long documents. Videos and images attract our attention and companies need to make such videos available to their customers. But the more videos and media the companies create and the more markets they want to use them in, the greater the need to store them somewhere centrally, manage and subtitle them and put them in the right format to publish for the wider world.  
We ourselves did a corporate video and case study videos and as we were doing them were accutely aware of how companies need to manage these assets, along with other media assets such as images and audio files. Additionally, if you have voice over on a video, which most do, you will need to translate them either using subtitles or dubbing and in future will want to start reusing previosuly translated content, as well as integrate them as part of a workflow. This is all part of the vision SDL has in Global Information Management. All of these different types of content need to be created, managed centrally, reused and made available for global markets - all as part of an integrated strategy that improves the customer experience as well as the efficicency of doing this.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to advertise in the ways they have done traditionally - or certainly more recently. As consumers, we have become savvy to blocking out adverts we see around us, we can put emails into a spam filter or hit the delete button if we don't want people to market to us. So people in marketing, like me, have to be continually alert to the changing environment around us and be creative in the way that we educate on our products and engage with our customers.

Amazon's Kindle is an interesting example of a company looking at new revenue streams through advertising. You can now buy a Kindle at a reduced price - $25/£15 less to give permission to companies to advertise to you. So the version of Kindle is available at a lower cost, if you are willing to allow this. I'm not sure if $25 is enough - I'd probably personally pay the extra £15 in my world and be left in peace to read my book! But if it were substantially less, I might well consider it...  

But this concept, referred to as 'Permission Markting' is an interesting concept. Normally we think of permission advertising more in terms of email opt-ins and such-like, but this takes it a step further..- buying the permission to advertise to people - that way they know they will get it and they accept that.

I don't know how many of you have looked at the stats on the Internet World Stats site from last year, on internet usage around the world, but I found them fascinating! Asia has by far the most internet users, followed by Europe and the top 3 countries in the Asia list is China, with a massive 384 million users, Japan with 96 million and India 81 million. They are far and above the usage of the biggest European internet user - Germany at 65 million.

So 2 'emerging markets' are in the top 3 of world internet users. China is well ahead - and yet, Asia is only at around 20% penetration rate, meaning there is 80% of Asia not using it. America has 77% of its population using the internet. So.... where does the biggest growth seem to be set? It looks to me like Asia - China and India probably. You can see another blog I wrote about the growth of online retail in China.

What of course is an important factor in all of this, is that companies need to look at the best type of web content management solution to handle this infrastructure, as well as one that links in with their multilingual processes - in order to ensure that the content on the web in these non-English speaking countries is personalised and relevant for the local markets. Such solutions exist, that integrate your web content management solution with your translation management system, to ensure an easy and efficient process for handling large amounts of content. Additionally, once you have such a solution you can then integrate machine translation, translation memory and all other great technologies into your process for creating multilingual web content. 

Today sees the announcement all over the news of the queues of people ready to buy the iPad 2 from Apple. Queues are heavenly for marketers, as they further enforce the view that 'you must have whatever they are queing for, therefore you should queue too.'

But how does a technology company like Apple ensure they deliver products within a short time frame to global markets - as Apple did in 25 countries? There are many things companies need to cover and having strategies in place to manage that is key.

One of the reasons you will be on this site is because SDL helps its customers in the aspect of communicating to global markets. Companies like HP, by having a strategy in place, have been able to reduce time-to-market substantially (you can watch the video as they talk about it themselves). Manufacturing organisations like Hach have reduced time-to-market by 40%, as have airlines like Continental Airlines.

So it doesn't matter whether you are in leading-edge consumer electronics, the travel industry or manufacturing, having the right processes, strategies and technologies in place will make sure you can get to market in time to keep those queues around the world building! The strategy such organisations adopt is Global Information Management.

Another recent article today talks about the growth in the online retail sector in China. Various reasons are given for this including that many of the Chinese are moving outside of the city centres and the retailers have not yet set up shop there. Additionally, the experience in a shop in China can be that you need to do your research before you go anyway, as there is a lack of skill in the shops. And on top of that, there is always the danger of buying a fake, whereas you are safer if you go direct to the manufacturer.

Particularly in troubled times, it makes sense to be doing business outside of your home markets. The global industry players know this and today this has been confirmed by Audi, who has shown that mainly due to the growth in the purchasing of luxury cars in China and the United States, the German car manufacturer has reported strong growth for 2010.

As per the BBC article on the topic, net profit for the year came in at 2.59bn euros ($3.61bn; £2.23bn), up by 50% on the 1.3bn euros the firm made in 2009. Revenue rose 19% to 35.4bn euros. The carmaker was also upbeat about its prospects for 2011.

So if you ever doubted it, the proof is in the pudding.

I am at SDL's annual Global Information Management conference, Innovate. Surrounded by leading brands such as EMC, Starbucks and HP, I am impressed at the disucssions that are taking place and the strategies companies are adopting to provide information to their customers that is relevant and up-to-date.

The internet has created huge opportunity but also creates significant challenges. Internet usage is steadily rising across the globe - we will pass 2 billion users this year.

It is possible to operate a traditional business in selected languages but a website on the internet makes your business truly global. The internet is also responsible for the explosion in content volumes as anyone can become an author. The struggle for businesses is how to manage multilingual communication with customers, suppliers and even employees when content changes rapidly and has a limited life. This combination makes traditional translation processes too expensive and slow for real time communication. This is where SDL BeGlobal comes in, for an introduction view the short video.

More information on SDL BeGlobal

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.