SDL Language Services Blog

Did you know? … Over a 10 year period, the capitalization of a company with a well-managed brand can expect to be 200% greater than a poorly managed brand.

How do you distinguish your company in a crowded global market place?  It’s a question Marketing Managers regularly ask themselves.   Building a globally valued brand is undoubtedly one of the most popular answers but this raises the next question.  How do you manage this in practice to ensure the brand remains consistent across international borders but retains its local relevancy? This is where Operational Brand Management steps in. 

Operational Brand Management …. A combination of people, process and technology that allows an organization to consistently and accurately drive the brand in the language of choice for the customers in a manner consistent with the corporation’s global strategy.

In order to translate the strategic intent to have a global brand into actual execution, Operational Brand Management identifies 3 core areas to focus on:

• Cross-divisional communication
• Processes, best practices and methods
• Technology

Each of these functions needs to be considered and aligned with strategic goals.  The following questions should be asked of each:

• Does the current process support or hindering delivery of a global brand? 
• What immediate, medium and long term changes need to happen? 
• Who needs to be involved in these changes?
• How will changes be measured?

Only by optimizing the individual elements of how global brand communicate with local audiences can International companies hope to build a truly valuable global brand.

...and then there were two.

The stage is set for the 2012 Globalization Challenge finals taking place at Innovate on March 5^th.  SDL is flying Team Research in Motion (Alex and Victor) and Team KCI (Megan and Nicole) to Santa Clara, CA to compete in the first-ever live finals.

The Globalization Challenge began as a fun and spirited quest to find the team in North America with the greatest knowledge of global markets, content, globalization and localization.  With more than 21 total matches held online and in Boston, Austin, Toronto and the Silicon Valley, the field of 50 teams was reduced to five competing in the semifinals on February 3^rd and 6^th, with KCI and RIM emerging as the highest-scoring teams.

Think of the matches as a lively, light-hearted quiz between teams of two.  The quizmaster asks a starter question worth 10 points…fastest team on the buzzer wins the opportunity to answer.  If the team answers correctly, they are given the chance to answer three bonus questions worth five points each.  The team with the highest score at the end of the 15-minute match wins.  Easy enough, right?

Part of what has made the Globalization Challenge appealing to all is that the questions cover a wide variety of topics and are geared towards participants of all backgrounds.  For example, questions that have been posed to the participants include:

How many nations does the International Date Line run through?

Spanish and Portuguese are two languages of South America. Name the three other national languages.

What does the acronym XML stand for?

So that brings us back to the finals.  Join us at Innovate on March 5^th at 12:30 p.m. and cheer on KCI and RIM as they battle it out to be named the winner of the 2012 Globalization Challenge (and bragging rights, of course)!  Who knows, it could be your team standing on the podium at next year’s finals. 

Follow the Globalization Challenge conversation on Twitter:  #G11nChallenge

I was really happy that Jack Molisani decided to host Lavacon this year in my adopted backyard, Austin TX. LavaCon, for those that don’t know, is a conference dedicated to digital content and this years theme was Developing Content for a Global Audience which is a perfect theme for the time we are in.

In the Boston social scene I get asked the question “So, Abby – what do you do (for work)” by every new person I meet.

Having spent my adult formative years in Colorado I still find the question to be an irritating contrast to what a Coloradan would ask, which most usually would be “what do you do for fun?” I suppose both questions are being asked with intent – for the Bostonian it’s to size up your pedigree and for the Coloradan it’s to size up your lifestyle. Inevitably the former leads to a predictable line of questioning. In an effort to put the question to bed and move onto non-work related topics, (because who wants to talk about work outside of work?) I try to answer in the simplest way that I can.

Here’s how the conversation goes 99% of the time…

Setting: Forty 1° North, Newport, RI – 4th of July weekend

Usual Suspect: So, Abby – what do you do?

Abby: (enjoying a beautiful night on a holiday weekend) What do I do….for what? (please don’t say for work, please don’t say for work)

Usual Suspect: For work.

Abby: (ugh, here we go again) I’m a consultant for a language translation division of a global information management company.

Usual Suspect: Oh, wow. (somewhat confused) So how many languages do you speak?

Abby: One.

Usual Suspect: (perplexed look) Oh! (light bulb goes off) My uncle just got that, he’s learning how to speak Spanish.

Abby: You’re thinking about Rosetta Stone which is a DVD that teaches you how to speak another language. That’s not what my company does.

We translate websites, documentation, software… for example, if you speak German and you want to book a hotel online- we’re the company that translates that website. If you buy a car and you look at the user manual – flip to the back of the book and you’ll find French, Spanish, Italian, German – we translate that manual. If you use a BlackBerry and you speak Korean – that phone interface will have been translated and tested so that you can use it. Anything that needs to be translated into any language, that’s what my company does.

Usual Suspect: Oh, ok, that makes sense. Isn’t a lot of that being automated now? How much is Google taking away from your business?

Abby: (double ugh) It’s not. You’re thinking about machine translation. While there are some very good applications for machine translation and specific cases where it is a good solution, companies still need human linguists to translate their communications to capture the appropriate voice, messaging and intent of the content.

Put it this way - imagine if you were going to purchase something online and there were spelling errors or grammar mistakes, or the wording was out of place – would you buy on that website? No, you would probably assume the company was fraudulent and you would click off that browser. The same is true for all types of multinational companies that sell into many markets. They need to translate their content into the language of the consumer and they need to do it in an accurate and communicative manner.

Usual Suspect: Ok, so what do you do?

Abby: I help companies develop solutions for how they communicate in global markets. Translating the materials is one thing but developing a solution for how it’s approached is another. For example - when a company wants to understand how to manage their brand on a global scale and their operations are the US and their global infrastructure consists of external agencies located worldwide– I work with them to craft the right solution. Or when a company is opening a retail store for the first time in a new or emerging market – I help them understand how to approach that market; or when they’re wondering how they can scale their software testing efforts into 35 languages and yet reduce their development and release cycle - I work with them to do this.

…so now you’ve seen it: a snapshot of the conversation that I probably had a few times this past weekend. First impression of the dude I’m talking to – not that much to talk about; impression of global language services – lots to talk about.

Everyone has questions so let’s hear yours @Abby_Porter

As you may be aware the European Commission published a report last month on user’s language preference online. For anyone trying to reach customers across Europe this report should be of particular interest to you. 

Nowadays, content is important. There is so much competition. Impactful content is crucial. If content reinforces the brand and the reward... people will buy – sometimes even without trying the product or service. Decisions are often based on metaphysics of brain and heart, often triggered by well-targeted marketing. People are buying increasingly without meeting a real person. I meet people embarking on multilingual content programmes. They seek revenue growth by expanding in existing or into new geographies.

The question I ponder is,

Hey y’all (I am from Texas, so that is a proper greeting) J

Anyway, I am here at SDL Innovate 2011 a Day 2 has kicked off with a bang. I am listening to Toby Bell, Vice President at Gartner Research (and admiring his hair – I am so jealous). He has absolutely captivated the audience. His presentation is called “Online Channel Optimization” and he is focusing on how the User Experience and how it directly impacts new sales growth for clients.

Last Thursday I presented an online webinar called “Real Time Translation can be useful, but how accurate is it?”.

Automated(or Machine) Translation is right now one of the most talked about topic in the localization industry. Some localization companies are offering Automated Translation to their clients, and buyers of localization services need to educate themselves not only on the services offered, but on the results that can be expected, so to be able to make decisions that best suit their company’s goals.

We’re going to be making some improvements to the blog over the next few months and we would love to hear your feedback so we can tailor the blog to your needs.

We want to improve everything from the site structure, to the type of content we create. We’ve looked at some best practices and we’ll be testing them to see if they improve the site for you. But what we are really interested in is what you want to see.

Someone I follow on Twitter tweeted information about a blog entry called “How to get rid of bad translation choices” http://blog.albatrossolutions.com/  and as this post was written by Gabriella Ascari, an Italian translator, and as it had an example in Italian, I could easily empathize with it.

Any translation department  or freelancer is faced with this issue: it is not necessarily a “wrong” translation but the style is not quite there, the word choice could have been better, when you read the sentence it does not sound too good to your ear…what to do about it?