As professionals in the localization world we tend to deal with the top five languages most of the time, the top 50 some of the time and occasionally the top 100. Languages outside that are only tackled on an occasional basis. Dhivehi falls into that latter category (I believe we only have a couple of other clients with that language requirement) but there is another category of languages as well – those are the so called Endangered Languages. Estimates of how languages are in danger of extinction vary but the commonly accepted number is between 2500 and 6000 depending on which expert you ask. Beyond that there is a much less talked about category of languages that aren’t endangered but also aren’t commercially or globally viable.

Superhero

K. David Harrison is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College but as one of the founders of Living Tongues perhaps he is better known as the world’s superhero for endangered languages: He has written books, has appeared in almost every newspaper in the world, and has even reached the pinnacle of media – he was on The Colbert Report - which would be compulsory TV in my house if we had cable! His most recent book is a bit of a mouthful “When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge” doesn’t concentrate on proving that languages are dieing - that battle has been won and most researchers agree that outside the top languages  there is a steady and rapid decline in language use. Harrison concentrates on my favorite question – “So what, who cares?”. This isn’t a translation or a localization book and even goes beyond anthropology. It is a profile of humanity.

So what, who cares

Harrison has spent many years working with communities whose languages are dieing or have died. The Tuvans (as obsessed over by Richard Feynman) have a vibrant culture but their language is dying – being replaced by Russian. Using the Tuvans and a hundred other examples, Harrison helps us understand why languages are vanishing (urbanization rather than design) and what we lose when those languages disappear.

Back to Dhivehi (and Welsh)

Obviously Dhivehi is nowhere near endangered status – after all, it is the official language of a Sovereign State (the Maldives). That said, is is not a commercially viable language for most translation companies because not enough people outside the Maldives want to translate to or from it. So the question I asked was what role does the localization industry play in supporting the many thousands of languages, like Dhivehi, that lie in-between commercial/global and endangered. As a natural born Welshman, my own country’s language once fell (and arguably still does fall) into this category so perhaps this is personal.

As a given languages becomes less and less popular it moves towards the tipping point – the point at which it becomes impossible to find people willing to base a career in translating back and fore between it and the more commercial languages. Vendors, especially the larger ones, unwittingly play a role here - they are the connectors between clients with need and the ever-decreasing number of translators to that language.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not ascribing a noble nature to the language service business. I certainly don’t think the big-thinkers at the larger vendors (myself included, I guess) spend much time thinking about this type of thing… but perhaps we should.

The expert panelists brought years of expertise in localization to the discussion.  Francoise is the VP of Global Programs at Valente Consulting.  She worked for Microsoft for 11 years as a globalization project manager in charge of evangelizing globalization best practices to the Windows User Assistance team and has authored multiple articles on localization and globalization.  She led the discussion on gauging the return on investment for localization spending, when to localize and effectively educating stakeholders on localization.  It was an honor to hear her speak on these topics and people in the audience were able to discuss their own solutions and ideas as well.

Steve  has spent more than a decade building global brands and helping clients succeed online in the U.S. and abroad. A seasoned online business strategist and marketer, Steve has significant experience in the technology, entertainment, health care, publishing and travel & tourism industries, among others.

In addition to writing magazine articles and white papers about international online marketing and multilingual website development, Steve addresses audiences around the country, from the Japan Society of New York to the Software Association of Oregon.  His expertise crested an interesting discussion on measuring user acceptance in target locales, collecting information from customer support teams to provide data about localization and managing global websites.

Yvan has over 14 years of experience in the localization industry in a wide range of roles including, project management, program management, account and business development, and operations management.  Beginning his career as a translator and project manager gives him deep understanding of client needs, solutions, and budgetary requirements.  His skill as divisional director at SDL comes from his expertise in managing all aspects of translation and localization projects, directing project teams, and monitoring customer success. Yvan provided insight into best practices for in-country review, terminology management and localization in a recession.

The discussion was very interactive and provided best practices, strategies and solutions for common, and not so common, localization challenges.  For a listing of similar events near you, please visit www.sdl.com/events. SDL is also beginning a webinar series in a few weeks on a number of topics – links below. The entire list of webinars is

Week 1 – July 07, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Increasing Translation ROI
Week 2 – July 14, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Localization Testing
Week 3 – July 21, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Best Practices for Machine Translation
Week 4 – July 28, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Localizing Audio and Visual Content
Week 5 - August 04, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Best Practices for in-country validation and review
Week 6 - August 11, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Localization in an Agile environment
Week 7 - August 18, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Business Process Outsourcing

Too often the first question is “how much per word” when the first questions should be “what do you do to maximize appropriate reuse and improve quality”.  This doesn’t just mean technology, although technology certainly plays a role, it means how do you use the tools available to the greatest possible return on investment.

The webinar will focus on best practices for improving you translation memory leverage, how “active” TM management can make a significant difference and how to calculate the total cost of ownership of your localization practice. The second half will focus on some specific things you can do to improve the value you get for your translation spend. For full details of this session follow this link.

The entire list of webinars is

Week 1 – July 07, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Increasing Translation ROI
Week 2 – July 14, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Localization Testing
Week 3 – July 21, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Best Practices for Machine Translation
Week 4 – July 28, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Localizing Audio and Visual Content
Week 5 - August 04, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Best Practices for in-country validation and review
Week 6 - August 11, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Localization in an Agile environment
Week 7 - August 18, 2009 (9:00 PDT) Business Process Outsourcing

First, let me state that I believe automated translation tools have a place in the localization industry. For the right organization, you will see significant improvement in cost, quality, consistency and time-to-market by using some degree of machine translation.  However, language is a constantly changing creature, and it is this constant transformation that makes it the sole possession of humans.

Some may be asking, “What are pidgins and creoles?” In short, they are languages. A pidgin occurs when two separate languages are pressed together for the sake of singular communication. Typically, the pidgin is very rudimentary, since the two sides will still communicate in their “mother tongues” when separated. A creole is when the pidgin becomes a new language, growing in complexity at an exponential rate until it becomes its own “mother tongue.”

For example, Brazilian Portuguese is a combination of many different languages. While the source language for context is Iberian Portuguese, there are distinct differences brought on by Spanish and indigenous languages. Brazilian Portuguese is a creole, formed by the need to for multiple cultures to communicate. As the European cultures arrived in South America a pidgin was created to make simple verbal communication possible amongst all groups. As the years passed, this pidgin became the common language and more terminology and complexity was added. Children were taught this language from their parents, instead of the “mother tongues.”

Spanish is another example of pidgins and creoles, especially in Latin and South America, where each country has a distinctive feel to their Spanish and there are differences. While the differences are not as vast as the ones between Iberian and Brazilian Portuguese, dialects in Peru have distinctions from Argentina, based on the indigenous influences each area had on the original Spanish settlers, i.e the Incan culture in Peru.

In his book, “Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World’s Lowliest Languages” Derek Bickerton ascertains that original pidgins were created throughout a 5-7 year period of cross-communication between two separate languages, with the transition to creole occurring at the start of the next generation. However, as communication tools increase in scope and availability, the rate of change for both has been cut by almost 75%. This means that completely new languages are being created every 5-6 years!

For this, you need to look no further than American English. Each year words are added to Miriam-Webster’s American Dictionary. Words that did not exist five years ago are now commonly used in media. While my mother has no clue what “fo-shizzle” means, it is a commonly used term amongst my younger sister’s generation (Incidently, it means “for sure”). This term is engrained in her culture, and will be taught to her children as though it always existed. While this is just one word, understand the scale is exponentially greater. Machines, no matter how advanced, cannot keep up with the evolution of local languages. Even if cultures stopped communicating with each other tomorrow, the intra-cultural exchanges would still bring about changes in language. It might be at a slower rate, but it would still occur.

This is why machines can never fully replace humans in language and translation. The complexities of verbal communication between people are too complicated, random and “human” for machines to completely grasp. As an aside, this is also why in-country translators are necessary for localization to be effective. No matter how fluent you are in a language, even a native speaker loses part of the pidgin when they are no longer local.

I would appreciate any comments or thoughts on machine translation, pidgins or creoles from anyone reading this blog. Thanks, Jonathan

On June 4th, I was a co-panelist with Jason at one of SDL’s best-practice localization events.  This is a transcript of part of Jason’s Q&A session.

Question:

 What are some of your biggest challenges you have faced in localization at Celanese?

 Answer:

 Our biggest challenge at Celanese is maintaining a strategic view of translations. Too often we get caught in the day-to-day of, “It’s got to be done at a certain time. I have a timeframe and I want it done accurately.” At Celanese we have sometimes stop and ask ourselves, “What is the true purpose of translating this material?”

 For example, we translate the Business Conduct Guidelines every year. When I started we had hundreds of pages on our website, so we were translating each and every page for multiple languages online. We took a step back and thought strategically about this process. We accepted that most people did not read every single page of the Business Conduct Guidelines on the website.  Most people, if they wanted to read the entire document would print it out. Looking at the BCGs from a high-level view, and the “why” behind our needs to translate we agreed that localization of the BCGs was still important, however we decided to PDF everything.

  Now there are twelve sections online, still fully localized, but we have reduced server costs since we do not have hundreds of web pages out there taking up space. When we updates, we simply upload the new document and we are good to go, which is a strong reduction in our “time-to-market.”

 We found we were right to translate the content, but there was no good reason “why” we were doing it the old way. The new way, using PDFs, made better time, resource and financial sense and the material was put in a format that was easier for our employees to use.

 Second, in keeping with that theme, it is important to understand “what” you are trying to achieve with the translation, and not get caught up in the metrics.

 As an example, our company was releasing a localized global employee survey into five different languages. I did not measure the success by the accuracy of the translation, not that accuracy was not important, but the key was we wanted 70% return on the survey from our employees.  All of the materials developed around the survey were to get you to take it. So when my boss asked me, “What was the ‘value’ of the translations?”, I told him the goal was 70% return and I came in at 75%. One of the reasons behind that was the translation of the survey, because if someone cannot read the survey, they cannot take the survey. Additionally, if the site directors in the other countries do not have their talking points translated they will not have the same impact.

 I did not pitch it to him on the word count, i.e. the translation was 99% accurate. What I say is “you had a business goal, we exceeded it, and translation was one of the main tools that allowed it to happen.”

 If I am translating safety material, I do not judge success by timelines met, but by the number of injuries we reduce.  I take that to my boss and say “part of the reason we hit the reduction was the translation process.” Far too often people become too process-focused when the conversation of translation comes up and they lose sight of the reasons “why” you are translating.

Is it generally better for the business to drive localization strategy or do you find the business.

Good question… so I will come at this from my perspective, from my experiences. My background is in web, specifically in building interactive marketing strategies, but I think the lessons I have learned have application outside interactive marketing. Premiere Global Services is a global provider of on-demand applied communications technologies. Our global headquarters is in Atlanta and we have a presence in 24 countries.

But before we start, let’s be real about some things. The decision of whether localize first or create a global sales strategy is made somewhere above our pay grade and most of us are not in a position to fundamentally effect the company we work for. Our job is to take that corporate strategy and create a strategy for global markets that best supports the company’s goals. That means each of us need to understand what those goals are so we can best advise the “higher pay grades”.

We don’t get to make decisions on corporate strategy, but we do get to support that strategy.

So given that, let’s take a step back and look at the options. If you have feet on the street outside your domestic market, you have no choice but to enable those guys. If your target is to globalize because you feel that you need to compete ‘out there’, be very cautious in the way you (localization managers) build your localization strategy. It has to be extremely fluid – localization is a very expensive proposition so if you don’t have channels in-country, you have to ask if localizing right now is the right thing to do.

Given that this forum is for localization best-practices let’s assume our “higher pay grades” have a corporate strategy that leads to a localization strategy. The first rule is “don’t half-step”. So many managers with responsibility for localization figure they can go into this slowly, waiting for the global strategy to show results before implementing a local-language strategy – but you have to make the strategic decision to support language alongside the corporate decision to do business somewhere. At the end of the day, when that key sale is made you have to be ready to support it.

“Boots on the ground”

For us at Premiere Global the situation is that over the last 20 years we have grown dramatically through acquisition, both of domestic US companies and also in EMEA and Asia-Pac. So it reached a critical mass for us, and we realized that we needed to synchronize about how we present our brand to the marketplace. Which all sounds great…

… but what we found by the time we reached that conclusion was that the boots that were already on the ground – the business development, sales and marketing teams in each region and country – had been doing whatever they had to do to create the materials they need…. and now we had a mess on our hands. Four or five different websites all managed by in-country individuals, four or five versions of each product manuals and sales collateral with no consistency of style and varying levels of accuracy.

For a global company this isn’t acceptable and so my advice is that once boots on the ground and a presence outside the US you must support that team as well as you support your domestic teams. That doesn’t necessarily mean translating everything but it does mean being ‘real’ about the commitment to local markets and trade-offs you will undoubtedly experience if you half-step market-preparation.

Lessons learned

So ultimately we decided that a key part of global expansion is in understanding exactly how we will support our people in-country. That strategy means knowing how we will support them getting the materials they need to be able to market, to sell and to support. This helps the company be smart when making choices about where to invest time and effort.

Editors note: Michael has kindly agreed to answer any questions and repond to comments when they are posted.

I was lucky enough to sit on the panel alongside Scott DeFusco of Deltek and Michael Buckham-White of Premiere Global yesterday. I have met Scott a number of times in the past but not Michael.

Michael is a 15-year veteran of human communications profession.  He held positions with a number of telecommunications companies, including AT&T, and was instrumental in launching the current UPS brand to the internet.  He is currently the Vice President of Interactive Marketing and CIA (Customer Insight & Analytics) for Premiere Global Services. Michael did an excellent job of chairing a Q&A on whether business (revenue)should drive globalization strategy or whether strategy should come first in order to drive revenue. The right path for most companies, of course, is a balance – but striking the correct balance makes the difference between success and failure.

Scott DeFusco, Vice President of Product Management forVirginia based Deltek, is responsible for driving the product strategy and innovation for Deltek’s Vision and GCS product lines. Scott has been instrumental in driving Deltek’s global strategy from product design through global go-to-market strategy. His Q&A was centered around the significance of educating business executives before executing a strategic sourcing solution for localization. Over the past eighteen months Scott has completely revamped Deltek’s approach to global markets – no mean feat for a fast growing software company – and to do that he had to build an education strategy for each major executive SVP and above. He also needed to craft a procurement and comprehensive vendor assessment strategy to select a localization partner.

Thanks to both Scott and Michael – and to everyone else that attended and participated.

Michael is a 15-year veteran of human communications profession and is an emerging leader in global interactive marketing.  He held positions with a number of telecommunications companies, including AT&T, and was instrumental in launching the current UPS brand to the internet.  He is currently the Vice President of Interactive Marketing and CIA (Customer Insight & Analytics) for Premiere Global Services, a global provider of on-demand communication solutions.

Scott DeFusco, Vice President of Product Management forVirginia based Deltek, is responsible for driving the product strategy and innovation for Deltek’s Vision and GCS product lines. Scott has been instrumental in driving Deltek’s global strategy from product design through global go-to-market strategy.

The two will be speaking as part of SDL’s roundtable series that puts thought leaders in global operations and localization in a local format. More information can be found at SDL’s website. After an initial moderator led Q&A session questions will come from the audience who, as ususal in the roundtable series, will be expected to join in and share their experiences and advice. The event is on Wednesday from noon until 3PM.

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.

“What do you see as the biggest challenges in creating a global-scale customer support environment today” A Q&A with Robbie Liotta of Dassault Systems transcribed from SDL’s recent Localization Roundtable in Boston.

Dassault specializes in mechanical CAD content and I focus on the technical support strategy. A couple of years ago we started to review the global support strategy – we found there was a huge library of support questions that were hosted in customer accessible FAQs but only for English speaking customers. Support requirements for non-English speaking clients had grown significantly and we saw no reason for that growth to slow – but non-English support was all via expensive call centers staffed with personnel who were multi-lingual. We set ourselves a goal of call-avoidance for redundant topics with the objectives of saving costs associated with 5-6 support personnel and improving the non-English speaking customer experience.

We began by tracking which English entries were hit most and selected any that were hit five times in a certain time period. We then selected languages – French, Spanish, both Chinese variants, Italian and Russian while keeping a watchful eye on other languages like Portuguese as markets like Brazil generated needs.

What we noticed as we approached this was that the English answers were often long and complex – not written in a style that made them easy to translate. Making the authors aware of what we needed – both in terms of writing style but also in terms of repeating common phrases (that had been previously translated) were also important. 

Once we knew what we wanted to do we had to confront how to achieve it. For the translation we reviewed all our options; clearly machine translation wouldn’t provide the accuracy our clients needed but traditional human translation was inordinately expensive and time consuming – especially given the high word count. SDL approached us with their Knowledge-based Translation System – a highly leveraged machine translation environment coupled with human post-editors. KbTS is offered as a service to clients with guaranteed service levels – but they told us the system only applied to certain types of content.

When we balanced the costs of continuing in the current fashion versus the benefits it seemed a no-brainer and our experiences to date seem to have born that out. Once you exceed a million words or so the technology really justifies itself because it builds on the other linguistic assets, adds the trained machine translation but retains the human touch to provide the perfect quality we need. 

 Question: What’s the cost difference in localization you experienced?

Answer: There are three levels to consider, pure machine translation, the KbT service and fully human translation, obviously backed by TM – in theis case SDL’s Trados. Pure machine translation is pretty inexpensive but not appropriate for what we are trying to do at the moment but we are looking at how we can use it in the future. Knowledge-based Translation is provided as a service rather than sold as a standalone product. The service guarantees quality and timeliness for clients who have appropriate content and although I can’t remember the word rates it’s something like two thirds of the cost of traditional human translation.

Question: What kind of training did you have to give your support engineers who are doing the tech writing?

Answer: Our situation might be unique because we have such complex software products and a significant amount of industry terminology. The whole process was pretty interesting though and training our authors was central since we had to make sure they used language consistently – especially the specialized words commonly used in our industry. As technical support staff, writing isn’t exactly our core competency so we did have to create training courses for them to cover basic lessons on how to write in a way that would be easier and less expensive to translate.

Lessons learned.  

To make this viable the benefits have to outweigh the costs. The basic points to make sure of: 

1.       Quantify the things to be translated using some method – we track how the English language FAQ entries were used and when the count exceeds five we have it translated.

2.       Pick your languages carefully based on the markets where support costs are highest

3.       Make sure the source content is simple and easy to translate. Train your writers so they can support the global support efforts.

4.       Make sure you have translation technology to support your needs. For us the KbT was appropriate, especially once we had the authors using the Author Assistant tool to make the English answers more consistent with style guides and previously translated content.

Robbie has offered to answer any questions you have. Post them as comments and he will reply.