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WELCOME TO THE RUBRIC NEWSLETTERIn This Issue: PM TIPS: Tips, tricks, and strategy from Rubric localization project managers. Welcome once again to the Rubric newsletter, where we bring Rubric's Better Localization Experience to your in-box. Past editions of the Rubric Newsletter can be found on our web site. We encourage you to forward this newsletter to anyone interested in localization topics. If you are receiving this newsletter from a friend, feel free to subscribe to our newsletter; you will receive your copy as soon as it is published. |
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PM TIPSRubric localization project managers know the ropes, and are happy to share their top localization tips with you in every newsletter, and on the web at www.Rubric.com/pmtips. Start by writing well: "Linguists tend to avoid translating user interface (UI) terms in any documentation due to uncertainty if the terms have been localized or not, and if the UI terms are then subsequently to be localized the dilemma begins — do they localize the UI terms now which will mean either having to go back and re-do the documentation to keep consistency or not localizing the UI to keep consistency with the documentation? Correct localizing sequence will save effort, time and costs." — Frank Lim, Project Manager
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RUBRIC NEWSRubric events — a lot is happening: SIIA and Globalization: Rubric CEO Ian Henderson is scheduled to join the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) Executive Council on Globalization at the inaugural meeting on September 14 in Palo Alto. The Council is charged with defining and working on best practices that will assist software companies as they reach out across borders and cultures. Ian is slated to head the Localization of Products and Services group. Breakfast Meeting: Rubric will host their first Birds of a Feather Breakfast meeting in Silicon Valley. Rubric will invite peer-level participants in technology companies to meet and discuss globalization topics. This networking and educational event is scheduled for the first week in December. Invitation will be sent shortly. |
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21ST CENTURY GLOBALIZATION ISSUES — IT'S NOT JUST FOR HIGH TECHA panel discussion led by Ian Henderson, CEO, Rubric |
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On May 9th, Rubric founder Ian Henderson led a panel of globalization experts at the Society for Technical Communications annual meeting. Ian's panel examined the new issues facing localization management in the 21st century.
Rubric: Let's look ahead. What is the next big obstacle or opportunity in communicating to international markets? Bill: Going international is no longer the sole domain of giant corporations like eBay or Adobe. Smaller companies in the $50-$100M range are now thinking international, thanks in large part to the Internet. It is therefore surprising to find that many companies view online machine translation services, such as BabelFish, as valid ways of supporting their entry into foreign markets. This is a view which is not shared by Japanese, German and French consumers, by the way. Globalization is a much more complex operation than just finding a translator with the requisite language skills. Unless there is a change in this mindset, companies are going to find this a major obstacle to penetrating foreign markets. It is our responsibility as suppliers in the language industry to make technology affordable and accessible, thereby helping companies overcome this obstacle. Claudia: To some extent the lack of Internet penetration is an obstacle. But it is important to remember that many countries are bypassing old-style communication methods such as fixed telephone lines, and jumping straight on to the Internet bandwagon. You have experienced this at a very personal level in remote areas of Mexico, for example: no fixed-line telephones, but plenty of cell phones and the Internet easily accessible. As this situation is improving by the day, there is a huge amount of opportunity in markets around the world. Sarah: Our biggest obstacle is also our biggest opportunity — finding the right set of languages to maximize benefit both to our customers and for our business. Not only new languages for our software, but ongoing development and support for existing languages as well as translation of documentation, training manuals, and datasheets. The cost-benefit analysis is key. You have to balance the time to manage the process, the total cost, and endless customer requests. Being embedded in local international markets and understanding the communication and cultural nuances of various geographies helps to find the right balance. Rubric: What approach to communication flow is best going forward — centralized or decentralized — and why? Claudia: Decentralization is the way forward! Outsourcing doesn't always get a good press, but it has to continue if companies are to remain successful. Saving costs is only one of the reasons for doing so. A more important reason is to be close to customers, as it is much easier to develop products suited to the Chinese and the Indian markets, for example, if product development takes place there. The challenge is therefore to enable and empower local offices to take on this increased responsibility for development and customer interaction. Sarah: For us right now... centralized, definitely! We enjoy more control over the terminology and linguistic accuracy of the translations. This means more managerial overhead, as well as more upfront cost and risk. SumTotal Systems has tried both approaches with our enterprise software. When we were decentralized, we risked not reusing information and wasting both time and money. I have concrete examples of when we reused materials and saved money by having central person share info. So, what works for a company at one time, may not be the right decision at another time. Actually, SumTotal Systems does it both ways — with our ToolBook product, where the decentralized approach dominates, and our Enterprise Suite, which is definitely centralized. ToolBook is smaller, sold mainly to individuals — localized to more languages, but for fewer users. The decentralized approach here is better. So, what works for one product and group might not be right for another product or group. Bill: There is no right or wrong here. Let us take the corporate website as an example. Translating every single page religiously is very expensive and will not satisfy the local markets, as the product line up in each country may well not be the same in every market. On the other hand, complete anarchy is not the solution either, if issues such as corporate branding and messaging are to be adhered to. A hybrid approach is therefore the most appropriate, where there is some central control over issues such as branding, look and messaging, but the local operations are left to develop their own additional content within these guidelines. Rubric: How do you handle reverse information flows? How do you enable central marketing and product people to hear the voices of foreign markets? Bill: Collaboration solutions are becoming much more pervasive. These are not just for internal communication flows but can also be extended to partners and consumers. I have already mentioned the examples of Microsoft and Novell utilizing these technologies. Only last month I was at a conference, where one company, Information Builders, had worked out the impact on their organization of implementing such a solution. Prior to implementation, their tech authors spent 7-8 hours a week on admin tasks, such as file management. This has now been reduced to ½ hour per week. The benefit in terms of information flow is that their tech authors now engage directly with end user, something they simply didn't have time to do before. This has had an immediate impact on the quality of the technical documentation, leading to a better product. Sarah: How do we collect information? It is important to point out that we are not talking about just languages, but the needs of different regions in terms of product functionality. For example, our Latin American customers are very verbal and like to work in groups. They need our collaboration features even for asynchronous, online learning. It's a cultural aspect of learning and we respect that. We empower our people in the field and solicit information both directly and indirectly, and direct that information to our product management team. We have regional and international user group meetings to help us determine not only languages to localize for, but what functionality is needed and appropriate for different areas of the world. We also have internal quarterly meetings — called Dash — to share information and ideas and include employees from around the world. Claudia: It is at a local level that new features are identified. Sometimes development may even happen in parallel with important customers locally. So the most important communication flow is via the traditional channel of country managers, who are in close touch with their local customers. Having a well-developed internal communication flow is therefore essential to getting this information back to the product development teams. Rubric: A wonderful set of answers, and some great insights into where we all are heading in the coming years. I would like to invite questions from the floor. This is your chance to dig into the minds of our panelists and get expert insights that address the problems you are facing. Who has a question? Audience Question: Is the language club purely a way for clients to pool their purchasing power? Sarah: Yes and no. The fine detail is still being worked out, but essentially each member pays a fee to join the language club. This fee is broadly in line with the cost of a localizing into a single language, and will cover the cost of adding a new language to the club. Each member of the language club gets access to all the languages in the club. Audience Question: A well-known Swedish furniture manufacturer is using pictograms rather than written instructions. Is this a trend moving away from the written word? Sarah: It is not always desirable to get rid of the written word. Using icons such as flags to indicate language is a recipe for alienating large user segments. Using a Mexican flag to indicate Spanish text is not going to please the Argentinean user for example. Another example is the green check mark which signifies acceptance in English, but does not translate into all cultures. Audience statement: There are books widely available on Amazon for example, which discuss the issue of appropriate icons to use in documentation. Rubric: Rubric is currently working with a client on how to convert written text into not just pictures, but small movies. The client is a manufacturer of highly technical measuring equipment; and describing the effect of changing frequency or amplitude is much better being described by means of a small movie illustrating the effect. Audience statement: This is starting to happen in military documentation. A soldier in Iraq who has a broken-down truck wants pictures to illustrate where the problem might be rather than lots of words. Audience Question: How proactive should a localization vendor be? Our current vendor is supplying help files which won't compile, with hundreds of linguistic issues. Is this normal? Should they not be proactive in fixing the process? Rubric: There are literally thousands of language services suppliers; but not all are equal. Rubric and the vendors present in this audience represent the quality end of the market; but there is a cost to that. If your sole criterion is low cost, it is likely to lead to the problems you describe. If you allow your vendor to change the overall process, by making changes to your internal workflow as well as their own, then you can start making some real savings, in some cases by 50-70%. Audience statement: It is basically up to you to set the expectations. A good vendor will live up to those if they are realistic. If your vendor is not doing this, you should consider changing. Rubric: Well, our time is now exhausted. I would like to thank Rubric's panel for giving so freely of their time and expertise. |
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RUBRIC, TOSHIBA, AND WORLDSERVER — SAVING TIME AND BUDGETBy Susannah Eccles, Senior Project Manager, Rubric |
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This is the second part of a two part series on how Rubric helped improve localization project efficiency for Toshiba using XML and WorldServer. The first part of the article appeared in the previous edition of the Rubric newsletter.What has Rubric gained by changing process and file format? Firstly, there are significant cost savings for DTP. At the moment as we are still in the investigative stage, and these figures are just projections. Currently for each Toshiba manual Rubric localizes, approximately 15 hours is spent pre-processing the English FrameMaker file. Then 15-18 hours is spent on page layout for the online and printed manual for each language (this goes up to 25 hours for the Arabic). So the scope for reducing the costs with the conversion to XML is huge. |
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We estimate that the conversion of the English source from FrameMaker>XML will take 1 hour. Then the final conversion from XML>PDF for each language will take 1-2 hours per language. So the time spent and the costs will be reduced massively, as you can see from these graphs. Saving project managers' time is also important, and a savings for our clients. At present I would estimate the setup time for the localization of a Toshiba manual into 18 languages to be a minimum of 3 hours, but it could be more. 
It takes 5-10 minutes at the most to set up the project on World Server, once World Server is set up correctly for use at Rubric. So this is a massive time-savings. So why did Rubric decide to change our processes? — in order to give further savings on DTP costs to Toshiba by using the FrameMaker>XML>PDF process; also to save project manager's time by using World Server. We have taken an incremental approach to the migration, focusing on World Server and assessing the feedback from all users, addressing all issues raised to ensure all the users are happy. We have constantly assessed World Server and asked: is it right for Rubric? We have picked appropriate tests and live projects. We have had issues at the process, human and World Server levels; we have worked through all of these internally, and with the support of the great team at Idiom, we have resolved all of them. I anticipate that more issues will come up, no doubt during our live project, but I feel confident we will be able to work through these as well with the support of Idiom. We have been able to make great time-savings, both for project managers and on DTP, which can be passed on as cost-savings to Toshiba. Overall it has been a very interesting couple of months and I am looking forward to starting our first live project in a week or two. |
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