In  a decentralized model how much should you support regional stakeholders who are trying to make decisions on what to localize? A Q&A with Lewis Costas of Pearson transcribed from SDL’s recent Localization Roundtable in Boston.

 

The business at Pearson is selling text books and within that I am responsible for the online business which includes interactive media, homework and assignments and things like that. So many of my products – the text books themselves – are heavily localized already and we are at the point where we need to decide whether to localize the online systems that support that.

So who makes that decision? For us it is the in-country division who decides whether to localize the online experience for their customers. Basically their decision is based on answering the question “how many more textbooks will I sell if I localize the online experience. Once they make the decision we work together on building the cost justification.

For many reasons, that process is challenging at times. As I educate the geo-market I have to teach them that the overall commitment is more than the cost of the software company (that creates the interactive homework site) and localization vendor (in this case SDL) but there is a commitment of their time to be involved up front from the beginning and throughout.

Like Robbie (Dassault) we have a huge number of terms specific to our business and a style of writing that Pearson alone can be accountable for. The commitment here is to be involved in the early stages for terminology management and in later stages for review of the translated text. There is another level as well – since we are dealing with educational texts we will often need the geo-markets to broker communications between SDL’s translators and  the professors who are the situational experts. So at the end of the day, even before business case planning, expectation setting with the local division is the most important part of the process.

 

Question: For us (at Phillips) our challenge isn’t building an online experience to sell more – we are B2B in nature so we measure how we empower a sales representative to act independently. With that in mind, our problem is that every geo-market wants a different thing based on the budget and appetite they have for localization. Because of this, our website is inconsistent form market to market based on country need and I find myself constantly explaining the benefits of localization to the stakeholders. How would you approach this?

Answer: In many ways it’s similar for us. Each market makes their decisions on how much to localize and our job is to educate them in many cases. The answer simply to educate as much as possible and illustrate successes in other locale’s. For your circumstances I would say you really have to use your successes in one region to persuade another. For us it is very valuable to point to the linguists and translation production resources in-country that our vendor has and illustrate how other markets have worked directly with them…this gives them a feeling of control – especially around terminology and translation quality.