Rubric Newsletter - 4th Quarter 2006 - sharing localization expertise

WELCOME TO THE RUBRIC NEWSLETTER

In This Issue:

PM TIPS: Tips, tricks, and strategy from Rubric localization project managers.

RUBRIC NEWS: "Birds of a Feather" breakfast meeting in Silicon Valley a success for localization pros.

BUSINESS — Market Acceptance Overseas: Localization impacts how foreign customers discover, learn, try, buy, and evangelize your products. Learn how localization can make or break you in each phase of a sale.

TECHNICAL — Closing the Globalization Gap with DITA: How DITA and other technologies can speed market entry and reduce your localization costs.

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.

Tell a colleague
about Rubric

Know someone who could benefit from a Better Localization Experience? Introduce us to them and we will send you an Amazon.com gift certificate.

"Our [Rubric] account representative has been responsive and helpful and has instilled in us a sense of welcome relief in Rubric's ability to service our translation needs."

Russ Foy
Senior Technical Writer
Chordiant Software

PM TIPS

Rubric 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.

Kelly Illingsworth

QA time essential: "Often Quality Assurance (QA) time is entered into a schedule. Keep in mind that this is not a buffer that can be cut out to meet deadlines. Rather it is absolutely necessary. QA time ensures that final products are of a high standard. Reducing it can have far reaching effects."

File format failure: "Ensure that the final file formats are locked down and agreed upon early in the project. Once translation starts it can be problematic to change outputs." — Kelly Illingsworth, Project Manager

RUBRIC NEWS

Rubric events — a lot is happening:

Silicon Valley Localization Pro Meeting: Rubric held a "Birds of a Feather" breakfast meeting in Silicon Valley for localization professionals on December 6th. This meeting was one in a series of informal events where Rubric is brining together peers from global firms to network, discuss localization issues, and to learn from one another. In addition to good food, great conversation, and meaningful exchange of ideas, Rubric's COO, Françoise Spurling, gave a presentation on tactics that localization pros can take to ensure linguistic quality. Future Birds of a Feather meetings will bring together people from product, marketing, and business disciplines. If you would like to attend one of our localization meetings, call or email your account representative.

Françoise Spurling
COO, Rubric

Many thanks for inviting me to attend the "birds of a feather" meeting this morning. I've gathered useful information, found the discussion helpful, and did some networking. Count me in for the next two meetings. — Libby Vincent, Manager of Production and Localization, EFI

MARKET ACCEPTANCE OVERSEAS

How localization affects acquiring new customers and keeping old ones
by Ian Henderson, CEO, Rubric

Ian Henderson
CEO, Rubric

Part One of a two-part series

Acquiring customers in your own country is difficult enough. Even where two people share a common language, they can often misunderstand one another if they use their common tongue imprecisely, or do not share cultural slang and idioms often used to streamline dialogue. This applies to marketing materials and products as well.

Take imprecisely composed sales materials and do a word-for-word translation for one of your overseas markets. The original meaning of your market message now ranges from completely incomprehensible to practically vulgar. It is nearly impossible to land a new customer if first you have offended their sensibilities.

Customer lifecycle: All of the phases of contact you have with a customer, from the moment they discover you, through the buying process, to after the sale.

This is why meticulous enterprises check every phase of communications throughout the customer lifecycle. In each phase, customers evaluate your company and products to decide if you are worthy of earning and keeping their business. Less than stellar translations can cause customers to drop out of the sales pipeline during any phase. As customers move through the phases of seeking, learning, trying, buying, returning and evangelizing your products, the precision of your translation will impact heavily on their decision for the next step.

In this article we'll examine the sales phases through which customers move, and we'll focus on where you must pay special attention in order to acquire and keep them.

Seeking
Quite often customers seek solutions to problems they face by looking for information, on anything from pain medication to specifications for mainframe computers. There are a handful of ways by which people seek out such information. The first is purely word of mouth — hearing about solutions from trusted peers. We'll cover this in detail when we review customer evangelism.

The next method comes through catalogs, magazines, and reference-oriented works. Properly translating simple things — such as your one paragraph product description used in product catalogs — requires the same thoroughness and finesse you apply to your products, especially if you are selling technical products.

Let us take for example the product description "high speed network of server appliances". Though the new use of the word "appliance" is rapidly spreading through technical communities abroad, it is not yet universal. One careless translation into German produced the phrase "schnellnetz der Bedienergeräte", which roughly means "high-speed net of the operator devices". Words that are intuitive to an American IT technology buyer, such as "server" and "appliance", lose their distinction with mere translation. A localization expert undoubtedly had to translate the same phrase in the product documentation, yet that high-quality translation did not find its way into your first point of contact with German customers, the regional solutions catalog.

More troublesome than technical translations are the language issues surrounding brands. Nike is famous for their "Just Do It" slogan. A translation to German that does not anticipate the American idiomatic use of the word "just" — meaning "forget other issues" — gets translated as "simply". There is a significant gap between the brand images Nike wants to portray — no-excuses athletes — and the phrase "do it simply". This is one of the reasons why Nike chose to use the original American/English slogan in Germany.

A mere translation can also raise idiomatic problems in the target language. American Airlines was promoting leather seats on their aircraft, and the American slogan "fly in leather" was translated into the Spanish slang for "go naked", which I doubt was the image the airline wanted to portray (though it no doubt sparked interest among Spanish travelers).

The point that cannot be emphasized enough is that if you fail to capture the customer's understanding of your product in the first encounter, you have very little chance of ever capturing them as a customer at all.

This issue becomes even more important now that the Internet has become the primary seeking tool for all types of customers around the world. Think for a moment about purchased keywords in Google. A company can spend a significant amount of money improving the "findability" of their products via keyword purchases, or waste that same money by not having a linguist with appropriate product or technology expertise determine the most likely keywords used in the sales region.

Automotive giant Honda introduced the "Fitta" model into Nordic countries only to find out that "fitta" is an old word used as a vulgar reference to a woman's genitals in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. The Japanese ads stated "[Fitta] is small on the outside, but large on the inside."

Often the subtleties of localized keywords have a significant effect on the success of your keyword buying strategy. Relative words like "large", "economy", or "popular" have linguistic and cultural variations abroad. Local slang is often substituted in Google searches as well. In-country experts are the best path for all localizations, but are critical when you have to attract a customer in three words or less, as is the norm with Internet searches.

Learning
After a customer discovers your solution to their problems, they may be compelled to learn more (excluding very low-cost items, which carry little risk and thus little need for research). Buyers are likely to "fall out of the pipeline" in this phase due to localization issues. The Internet is a wonderful research tool, and in any market where competing solutions can be readily found and compared online, the more easily understood product has a higher chance of initial adoption, all other things being equal.

There is a great deal of overlap between Internet-driven "seek" and "learn" phases. Web content — pages, PDF product specifications, white papers — are part of "organic search optimization", which is the ability to obtain a high ranking in search returns. Thus, the same issues which apply to localization of purchased keywords apply to all Web content as precise and culturally disposed Web content improves the odds of your product being discovered through search.

Customers learn details about products primarily through product reviews, packaging, and Web content. In each of these, the customer must learn two things: what they want to know, and what you want them to know — two sets of information that are often completely different. These two elements span a range from the conceptual (product overview and abstract statement of benefits) to detailed functionality (specifications). Accurate localization affects both ends of this continuum, but in different ways with different localization issues.

"Free" is a very abstract concept. When selling Salem cigarettes in Japan, the slogan "Salem — Feeling Free" was translated as "When smoking Salem, you feel so refreshed that your mind seems to be free and empty."

Concept-level localization is more important and more vague as it deals with two levels of abstraction — a concept, and how to describe the concept in local language and dialects. This is where in-country localization teams make a significant difference, as they alone can find the proper language elements to communicate abstract concepts. Since understanding a product at a conceptual level is necessary in order to understand the value of detailed features and functions, this point of localization is pivotal for products that require customer gestalt.

At the other end of the spectrum we encounter the realm of technical localization. Product features can often be easier to translate when the audience is technical or scientific by nature, since terms are often identical across regions, or are expressed in numbers (though more than a handful of firms still do silly things such as listing specification in Europe using American measures like feet, gallons, and fortnights). Employing translators educated in your technology is essential given that technical terms can be misinterpreted by novices, which at best makes your company look technically incompetent, and at worst might create liabilities from misuse of the product.

There is some overlap in the "seek" and "learn" phase, given that the language used in both must portray the customer's problem first, and in the language the customer would use to describe their situation. This involves describing the emotional state or desire of the buyer. Nike's "Just Do It" slogan targeted the emotional soul of athletes to create a strong emotive bond with a corporate brand. One customer we encountered had the slogan of "Peace of Mind", which in their native region described the state their customers wanted to achieve by using the product. A person working in their headquarters who spoke a little German crudely translated this into "peace of the understanding" (I think they may have actually used a machine translation tool). This phrasing does not communicate the same essence — the transcending of one's being into a more placid existence. Thus their prospects "learned" the wrong thing about the product and the chief benefit provided.

These nuances cannot be dismissed, since early sales cycle phases require emotionally recruiting the prospects (perhaps the American Airlines "Go naked" slogan wasn't a mistake after all). Even technology buyers have emotional desires vis-á-vis their technology, and if you don't believe this, get a Linux and a Windows advocate into a discussion, and be prepared to call the police shortly thereafter. Inexpensive consumer products are sold through purely emotional communications (how people feel about having bright hair, soft skin, white teeth, or a large bank account). Finding precise words, phrases, and imagery to communicate emotional biases in a locale is not achieved by rote translation. "Soft" can mean "silky" when referring to hair or "weak" as in physical physique. These subtle variations exist abroad. In Italy, you would avoid referring to a lady's flaccido hair.

Part two of this article will appear in the next edition of the Rubric newsletter.

CLOSING THE GLOBALIZATION GAP WITH DITA

How DITA Enables Global Companies to Publish in Many Formats and Many Languages, Simultaneously

Guest article by Bill Rabkin, WorldServer Evangelist, Idiom Technologies, Inc.

Many global organizations publish information - such as technical documentation, online help, and Web content - in many languages. They often experience a delay between the availability of new content in its original language and the delivery of that same content in other languages. We call this delay the Globalization Gap.

The Globalization Gap can be blamed on the common approach to content creation. Organizations complete documents in a first language, and only then do they begin to produce translations. This problem is compounded when an organization directs its initial translation efforts toward only a small number of "Tier 1" languages, deferring translation into other "Tier 2" languages until they have completed the first set. Content may not become available in all languages until months after the original documents were released.

Bill Rabkin
WorldServer Evangelist
Idiom Technologies, Inc.

The Globalization Gap causes a delay in availability of new or updated information in international markets, which in turn depresses top-line revenues for the company.

Figure 1. The Globalization Gap.

A one-billion-dollar multinational software company in the United States reported that they typically experienced a 3- to 6-month delay in delivery of new releases of their products to European and Asian markets. During this delay period, they estimated that at least 10% of their international prospects waited until the new release was available in their native languages before making a purchase, and that at least 1% purchased a competing product that was already available in the desired languages. As a result, the company calculated a US$11M revenue deferment or loss.

Closing the Globalization Gap delivers information of higher quality to market more rapidly, at lower cost, thus capturing accelerated international revenues. To close the Globalization Gap, companies must implement a centralized system that makes content globalization an integral part of the content lifecycle. This is especially true, and easier to do, with content that is based on modern XML standards.

Key Considerations for Globalization
To minimize the globalization gap, a combination of factors works to eliminate internal delays:

XML content management
centralized Translation Memory
an integrated approach to authoring with content management and globalization
automation of multilingual document composition

In this environment, authors concentrate on information development, not on formatting or presentation. Translators focus on translation, not on localization engineering or DTP. And the system includes automated processes to produce output in many forms in all languages.

DITA Speeds Global Information Delivery
DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, provides a solid foundation upon which to develop technical documentation and other information deliverables such as data sheets, brochures, and Web sites. Originally developed over many years by IBM, DITA is now an international standard managed by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) and supported by products from vendors such as Adobe Systems, PTC, XMetaL, Ixiasoft, X-Hive, Syntext, SyberLogic, Idiom Technologies, and many others. The DITA Open Toolkit provides a reference implementation of DITA along with associated documentation, examples, XSL transforms, plug-ins, and other related material.

DITA is an XML information architecture in which content is organized into topics. Simply put, a topic is "a chunk of information organized around a single subject." ¹ A topic is a unit of information with a title and content, short enough to be specific to a single subject or to answer a single question, but long enough to make sense on its own and be authored as a unit.

Like Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, a fundamental and important principle of DITA is the notion of specialization. In short, specialization involves creating extensions, or deltas, to the existing DITA DTDs or schemas. The DITA standard includes three such specializations of the basic "topic" — concept, task, and reference.

Figure 2. The DITA standard includes these topic types.

It is often true that with only these four information types authors can create comprehensive documentation for a wide variety of products and services. However, users of DITA can further specialize any of these information types, and also create additional specializations of topic, to model their particular information requirements. For example, an available apiref specialization of reference provides additional XML elements used by authors who are documenting a software application programming interface, and javaapiref (a further specialization of apiref) provides still more elements that are specific to documenting Java programming interfaces.

Another fundamental principle of DITA is information reuse. DITA facilitates and encourages reuse of content in many ways.

Information architects combine topics into various deliverables through ditamaps; some topics may appear in multiple deliverables such as a Getting Started pamphlet, an Installation Guide, and a User Manual.
Single sourcing supports production of different forms of output such as manuals, online help systems, HTML files, and other deliverables from the same set of XML topics.

Figure 3. Topic reuse. Four deliverables—two manuals, a Web site, and an online help file—are produced from the same set of topics. Topic 2 appears in one manual and online help.
Topic 4 is included in the other manual, the Web site, and the online help file.

Figure 4. DITA maps organize topics into a coherent set. Typically, different maps are used to produce different deliverables.

In addition, the DITA content-reference (conref) mechanism provides reuse of text that is smaller than a complete topic, such as a step in a procedure, book titles, product names, legal notices, and other boilerplate information.

Content Reuse Enhances Translation Productivity
Of course, content that is reused needs to be translated only once.

Figure 5. Each topic is translated once. In the target language, content is reused in the same way as it is in the source language.

With DITA, organizations perform translation on a topic-by-topic basis; there is no need to wait for an entire document to be complete before scheduling translation. "Translate early and often" becomes the norm. With a central Translation Memory that supplies perfect translations of all text that has previously been translated, there is no penalty when content changes. Simply reprocess the modified document. Only the new or altered content needs action by a translator and reviewer. Of course, as the number of target languages grows, and the frequency of topic reuse increases, the benefits of the DITA topic-oriented approach are magnified.

Figure 6. Translation into many languages multiplies the benefits of reuse. Click to enlarge.

Conclusion
Adopting the DITA topic-based approach to information development and delivery both simplifies and expedites publishing information for global audiences. Experience has shown that the benefits of a DITA-based global publishing environment are well worth the up-front investment.

For more information about DITA, see http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html and http://dita.xml.org. The DITA Open Toolkit is available at http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/. For more information about WorldServer from Idiom Technologies, visit http://www.idiominc.com/.

Bill Rabkin is the Globalization Evangelist for Idiom Technologies, Inc. In this role, Rabkin promotes the widespread use of XML- and DITA-based globalization and publishing solutions to technical documentation organizations throughout the world. Recently, he has been involved in the design of a worldwide publishing system for a major multinational manufacturing company. Before joining Idiom, Mr. Rabkin was a senior technical evangelist with Rational Software (now IBM Rational Software) as well as Sybase, Inc.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, Don R. Day, Michael Priestley, and Gretchen Hargis, IBM Corporation, March 1, 2001 (updated November 1, 2004), online at http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-dita3/.