For many companies, producing multilingual content is a complex, manual, time consuming process that increases the cost of delivering localized content. 

Challenges with a fragmented Global Information Management process

Across every industry increasing global competition has raised the stakes. Companies are attempting to accelerate time-to-market, leverage their global brands while providing an enhanced customer experience. Yet the process of managing global information to achieve these results is often fragmented, spread across corporate headquarters, regional offices and remote localization service providers.

As companies move into more and more markets so the complexity grows – having to deliver more content into more languages. This fragmented approach has a number of challenges:

• No centralised process leads to a lack of visibility
• No automation and process control means missed dead lines
• No centralised repository causes significant duplication of effort
• Poor quality assurance checking results in inconsistent brand and messages
• No corporate wide terminology database leads to inconsistent terminology
• Mistakes in localization exposes the company to legal risk
• Lack of localized content leads to poor customer experience
• No unified approach leads to an increase in localization costs

For most companies just throwing more resources at the problem is not an option. Not only are companies getting more aggressive with their time scales, wanting to do more but with less resource, but also budgets are being squeezed. Innovative companies, looking to capitalize on this new global market, are looking for a more sustainable solution. These companies are adopting a Global Information Management strategy.

The consolidated Global Information Management Process

SDL can help companies address these challenges by providing Global Information Management solutions that unify and enhance the entire global content delivery process. GIM solutions from SDL bring together SDL technologies, business best practises, and the industry’s most extensive partner ecosystem to address the challenges that enterprises face in supporting international markets. Focused on the complete process from authoring of content, through to final publishing and distribution – managing all the task and activities needed – GIM provides:

• Global Authoring
  Providing the content creators with tools to enable them to access and leverage existing, approved localized text, together with company terminology, from within a corporation’s existing authoring environment. By considering localization at the creation phase, authors can reduce localization costs and greatly enhance the consistency, quality and translatability of content.
  
  

• Global Localized Content Management
  Providing access to existing localized content and approved terminology, throughout the organisation. Supporting both centralized and decentralized models to maximize content reuse and minimize the amount of new localization needed. Automation streamlines the process of content reuse and ensures corporate terminology is maintained in the localized content.
  
  

• Translation Management
  Supporting the management and translation of content across the entire localization ecosystem from corporate localization departments to language service providers to freelancers. Automating many of the manual labour intensive tasks and providing real time reporting leads to better visibility and a reduction of processing time.
  
  

• Terminology Management
  Enforcing that the correct terminology is used in both the source and target language documents. Understanding that some terminology needs to be translated into the local language, while others, like company name and brand, should not. Terminology management leads to improved consistency for both local and localized content.
  
  

• Automated Translation
  Providing the language rules and dictionaries to allow for the automation of translation tasks. This machine translation, backed with human review, results in the highest quality of localized content in the shortest possible time at the lowest possible cost.
  
  

• Global Publishing
  Delivering content across print and electronic publishing channels to the right audience in their native language. SDL ensures that both graphics and text are consistent and provides a process for customizing these elements to support local nuance.

Global Information Management automation

• Process Automation
  Automating many of the tasks needed to process the files and move them through the Global Information Management process. Examples of automated tasks would include extracting and segmenting text from the files to be localized, establishing the costs for new translation jobs based on the level of translated content reuse and notifying people, both internal to the organisation and externally that they have tasks to be carried.
  
  

• Supply Chain Automation
  The localization supply chain starts with integration to the existing content management systems (potentially multiple ECM and WCM applications). This will start the GIM process when new content needs to be localized. GIM solutions extend the automation to the extended supply chain by automatically packaging up all of the content (including, project Translation Memories, corporate Terminology data bases, both source and target files and reference material) needed to carry out the translation and review. This localization supply chain is complete when the finished, localized content is delivered back ready for publication.
  
  

• Automated Content Reuse
  Being able to reuse existing translated content allows a company to reduce the amount of translation for new documents. GIM solutions automate the extraction of textual segments, comparing them against previously translated text segments and then inserting the reused localized text into the new localized documents. Companies have seen reuse rates as high as 90%, meaning that they only need to address the 10% of new text. But content reuse extends beyond the use of Translation Memories. By incorporating automatic Terminology Management, approved term lookup and reuse, many companies are seeing an improvement in accuracy and consistency of brand and messaging.
  
  

• Automated Translation
  Using language dictionaries and linguistics tools, Machine Translation technologies can automatically translate new text into the target languages. For some types of content automated translation can provide a good level of accuracy, but typically some level of human review is needed. Even so this automation can reduce the amount of text that needs to be manually translated.

Summary

Companies that have adopted a new Global Information Management process have seen significant benefits. These include:

• Reduced Costs – Companies are reporting average localisation cost savings of between 30% and 60%
• Reduced Time – What used to take months now being turned around in a matter of days
• Improved Quality and Consistency – Maintaining corporate messaging and brand across all global markets
• Increased Coverage – Many companies are achieving increased localization, supporting more web sites, and increasing the number of languages supported, without having to increase resources and costs

Global Information Management solutions from SDL, based on industry standards and leading technologies, deliver a globalization solution that is optimized for today’s global markets. GIM can accelerate the rate of simultaneous global product introductions, ensure message and brand consistency and enhance customer experience.

The result: Enterprises that have deployed a Global Information Management solutions achieve higher customer satisfaction levels as well as increased revenues and profits.