Building Global Sites and Translation work flow with a WCM (Web Content Management) perspective

Global websites provide the local face of a global company. Customers who expect accessible product support have a frustrating experience when they have to deal with website which is not in the native language and even more annoying if the support contact number is of a different country. That is why in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) model, language and linguistics playing a major role in their training process.

It is natural human tendency for people to speak their own language and it is quite obvious they want to do business in the same language as well. Most customers even if they are comfortable with English would prefer to buy in their own language.
A look on how a user can navigate to a global website:

Users can navigate to the global site by an icon or some sort of a navigation bar. For example on http://www.cisco.com the worldwide sites is located at the top menu bar, on clicking it the user can narrow down the selection on the regions.

On http://www.nokia.com, the locator is at the bottom of the home page.

Why we need to build global sites?

1. Makes Economic Sense –GDP of China and India are growing at more than 8% annually, and the entire world is looking at the growing economies to bring the world out of the current recession. The demand of the goods and services will rise and no company would want to miss the bus.
2. Cultural – Send the correct message to the correct audience.
3. Build the brand in the local market – GLOCAL concept – “Think Globally Act Locally”. Each market will have different sales and marketing campaigns and the global website should be able to support it independently.
4. Provide a better and a timely support service to the customers.
5. Better rankings and appropriate search results in public search engines and enterprise search engines.
6. Ability to monitor and respond to update any stale or incorrect translations in minimum possible time.

Strategy for building global sites and localizing/translating content:

1. Define the site area or sub-domains which will be the local home. Sub domain example like: mail.cs.example.edu or www.cs.example.edu., or the ISO standards http://www.example.com/ /… Language code can be CN(Chinese), IN (India) etc
2. Define the encoding standard – Unicode is the industry standard, some websites have different encodings for different languages ISO-88591 (English chars, French), Shift_JIS (Japanese)
3. Deciding the content strategy:
   Reuse existing original language content and localize
   
   1. Machine Translate – Use a machine or software which will do the translation to a chosen language. Some of the vendors are Systran, babelfish(yahoo), Google.
      
      • MT makes sense if there are budget constraints. It is an advisable practice that the MT output should be proof read first. Instead also provide an option on the website for the visitors so that they can provide their ratings, confirm if it meets expectations.
      • To save cost when local language content is required but the expense of human translation is prohibitive.
      • To save time when local language content is required but the delay for human translation is unworkable.
      • To improve customer service when human translation cannot meet the demands of content volume or rate of change.
   2. Human Translation – The services of a Translation Agency can be employed. As per the defined business process, a document can be sent for translation and the Agency can charge accordingly either per word or per pages.

Web Content Management and multilingual web sites

Effective solutions required correct implementation of a good strategy. Adhoc strategies result in process inefficiencies making it very costly to make changes and time to market is lost to the next competitor.

1. Enterprise Web content management in conjunction with ECM suite of products support multilingual websites. WCM solution enables authoring, managing, versioning and publishing of Web content—all in multiple languages. Technology helps to deliver a truly interactive online experience the visitors and customers.
2. EMC Documentum Web Publisher allows globalization and fallback rules. This requires separate publishing configuration for each language, which may become difficult to manage as languages grow.
3. Standards surrounding localization (XLIFF) for exchanging translatable data. XLIFF stands for XML Localization Interchange File Format.
4. Translation workflows - These are simple process workflows with special tasks used to translate a document. Translation workflows enable translators to be assigned a task and access content via the Web to conduct translations. Simultaneously, site managers can monitor the real-time state of projects. Each language can have separate workflow and approvals. The integration points can be integrated via Web Services, REST or CMIS.

Sample Business Process for Global Content Translation Workflow

Actors:

Content Management System and Publishing System (CMS)
Local Country Stakeholders
Marketing Project Manager (aka PM)
Marketing Developer (aka Developer)
Translation Agency (aka Agency)
Translation Workflow (aka TW)
Translation Workflow Engineer (aka Engineer)

Basic Flow:

1. Get latest version of the published content from CMS
2. Developer imports the content in TW.
3. PM access TW
   
   • Analyses the content (if required)
   • Selects translation Agency in TW and initiate
4. TW begins translation job.
   
   • TW analyzes and provides a PO quote for the task to the PM
5. PM confirms or denies PO confirmation
6. On confirmation Engineer submits content to TW
7. Agency access TW
   
   • Agency access TW gets the content
   • Agency translate content
8. Agency emails Translation PM of translated content
9. PM emails respective Local Country Stakeholder with translated HTML (English and Specific Language)
10. Local Country Stakeholders review the translated content
11. Stakeholder/Country Site owner emails PM with approval of translated content, If denied, the job is sent back to TW for further analysis.
12. PM emails Developer to publish translated content.
13. Translation job is closed in TW.
14. Developer, using CMS creates correct references, tags to correct metadata and publishes content via CMS to the site.
15. Content is published.

Conclusion

It is now a critical time for the companies to start thinking about global websites, the need is now stronger than ever. Local language sites provides a social framework for the customers and partners to come together and interact with each other and helps in building the brand. Using social help in improving the websites will surely be a challenging but an immensely worthwhile task.

Sources:

http://www.webstandards.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
http://www.emc.com/domains/documentum/index.htm