Category Archives: Software Localization

The Globalization of Enterprise Content Management Software

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From SharePoint to Documentum to Interwoven, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software provides the information infrastructure for  large enterprises, both internally and externally.

And although most ECM developers will eagerly say their software is “global” — not all software is equal when it comes to supporting all languages and locales. As one point of reference, SharePoint 2010 will be available in 40 languages by year end.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Principal Analyst and Director of The Real Story Group, has been covering the ECM industry for years and I recently asked him a few questions specific to the globalization of ECM software.

Here is the interview:

Q: You mentioned in your 2010 ECM Market Analysis that international vendors continued to thrive. Can you provide an example or two of vendors who have been innovating in this area?

The best known vendors, the market leaders in Gartner or Forrester research papers tend to be American.  However the actual market is huge with a multitude of vendors that get no coverage at all from major analyst firms.  Most of these vendors are “local” to some degree, be that predominantly active in a country such as Germany (Fabasoft) or Australia (Objective) — or even within a local market such as Chicago.

Q: Your report also referenced the consolidation at the top end of the market. Is this a good thing, or bad thing, with respect to international support?

That’s a tricky question — in that though there is a great deal of consolidation at the high end of the market (and likely more to come), there is new entrants coming into the market every week so it sort of balances out.  Support in your time zone, in your language is one the most important thing we stress to buyers, and even though the high end of the market claims to offer 24/7 support globally, that typically only works for their major products (storage infrastructure/databases) rather than their content management products, which are considered niche.

Q: To what extent are international requirements playing a role in product selection?

Ever more so.  This past year we have seen a very notable pick up with larger enterprises really starting to address international requirements either for their customers or their employees.  Its a tough nut to crack, but some of the largest (tens of millions of dollar) projects in the ECM market today are focused on multi-language, multi-location issues.

Q: Supporting social networking across locales and languages is becoming a pain point for many companies. Do what degree are ECM vendors addressing this pain. What platforms are leading in this regard?

ECM vendors are struggling to know what to do with social networking.  On the one hand the press and analyst community are talking of nothing else, on the other hand there is virtually no demand from end users and buyers of this technology for ECM to address the pain.  In as much as the pain is no more than the the normal consumer world leaking into the enterprise world, usually restricted to a handful of people or teams.  If there is a compliancy problem (the usual concern) then best to ignore its happening than to start out on a major project that has little chance of success.

Q: Given the pace of change in technologies, social networks, etc. what advice do you have for companies planning to buy or upgrade their ECM platforms?

Open standards — always open standards — never ever proprietary.  Your ECM platform should be just that, a platform. Capable of chatting and interacting will all parts of your business and IT infrastructure, many fall short of that expectation. The other thing to say is be realistic, you can’t now and never will be able to manage all your organizations information/content – focus in on priorities, content that is genuinely mission critical and do that well.

For more information, visit www.realstorygroup.com

What’s the world’s most global blogging platform?

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I’ve been writing this blog since 2002.

Back when I started out, I wasn’t sure how long I would stick with this “blogging” thing and I didn’t really want to make any investment in software (besides time).

I tried a few different platforms before settling on WordPress.

It was free — certainly a selling point. But it’s wasn’t the easiest blog to install or maintain in the early years. ISPs weren’t exactly offering it as a one-click install back then. And don’t get me started on the challenges of updating plug-ins.

But WordPress has certainly come a long way.

wordpress_georgian

I was surprised to learn that, thanks to volunteer contributions, WordPress is now available in more languages than Blogger or TypePad.

  • TypePad is available in nine languages.
  • Blogger/Blogspot (owned by Google) is available in 49 languages.

WordPress is available in more than 60 languages.

Not bad.

And now WordPress is now launching a software translation platform: GlotPress.

Makes sense. Offer to others the very platform you used to localize your software.

I’ll be interested to see how this new platform develops.

Mac Snow Leopard International Bug

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I recently got around to upgrading to Snow Leopard.

Along the way, I discovered a rather interesting bug.

It’s not a huge deal, but a bug nonetheless. And one likely to cause a fair amount of confusion.

First of all, if you have never modified your language settings (The “International” button on the System Preferences menu)  then you won’t hit this bug.

If, however, you have made some changes to your language settings, read on…

Here is what my International settings menu looked like before the upgrade:

You’ll notice that I have U.S. English at the top of the list, followed by Japanese, followed by a “neutral” English. Normally, U.S. English would be followed by neutral English, which is the source of the bug.

When I began upgrading to Snow Leopard, I was presented with the usual legalese page — except that this one was in Japanese:

Apparently, Apple ignored my U.S. English setting and figured I had my computer set up for Japanese, hence the Japanese text.

To fix this, I simply bumped up the neutral English language setting ahead of Japanese.

NOTE: The same bug will appear if you have British English at the top of the list followed by a language other than English.

UPDATE: This bug may also impact the results of Spotlight as well. That is, you could see results in Japanese mixed with English. I haven’t been able to repro it myself but have encountered a few blog posts related to this issue.

Translation crowdsourcing is the new black — and you can tweet me on that

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bird-translator

Was there any doubt that Twitter would not try to crowdsource its translations?

After Facebook proved that it could use volunteers to go from 1 to 100 languages in two years, it was just a matter of time before Twitter adopted the same model.

Twitter is starting out with the FIGS (French, Italian, German, and Spanish). And here is a video tutorial from Twitter that shows you how how the platform works.

Crowdsourcing is the new black these days, and much of it deserved. But despite the buzz, companies should be very careful before embracing the model.

Very few companies are translation-worthy

Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, TED, and Twitter have legions of fans who are happy to lend their translation skills. But few corporate sites or services are so translation worthy. And there’s the ever-constant risk of translator backlash or burnout. We are in uncharted territory, and as more companies pursue this model, we’re going to see more and more efforts backfire. Hey, maybe we’ll even see companies begin to “pay” their volunteers in non-monetary forms of compensation. Which leads me to…

Crowdsourcing may not save you much on translation

The translation platform, the management of the platform, the management of the volunteers — they all require resources. And the odds are that you’ll still want to retain professional translators to manage the amateurs, which is not a bad thing. There is a peace of mind in having a vendor who does this sort of thing for a living signing off on a newly localized web site before it goes live. In the end, translation crowdsourcing is not about saving money.

As far as I can tell, Twitter has only a thousand or so text strings that require translation. In the time the company devoted to building this translation platform, it could probably have had the site localized in 50 or more languages.

Over time there probably will be cost savings, but I would argue that cost savings should not be the motivator and probably wasn’t the motivator for Twitter.

The platform companies develop to support crowdsourcing should have other measures of success, such as user engagement and testing, partner opportunities, and developer involvement.

For example, on the Twitter Translate information page, this paragraph jumped out at me:

Will my favorite applications be translated, too?
We know that Twitter is not all about Twitter.com, so our global reach shouldn’t be limited to Twitter.com either. That’s why we’re planning to give our developer community access to the translation files so they can create wonderful apps that use the translations, too.

This is where Twitter is headed with the platform, as well as Facebook and Google. Once you have the platform, you can get creative with it — expand it to developers so that they can quickly localize their apps. You can even try to open up the platform for “partner” sites to use — which is what Facebook is now doing.

As companies comes to grips with social media, they are slowly learning to let go. Employees blog and tweet. Customers post content on corporate sites, and now they are co-creating the localized products.

The top-down localization model is giving way to the bottom-up model, and this is a profound change, even if it’s limited to a handful of companies — albeit companies that represent a few hundred million users. I’m still trying to understand how far this phenomenon will go.