Building Global Sites and Translation workflow

with a WCM 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?
i. 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.

ii. Cultural – Send the correct message to the correct audience.

iii. 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.
iv. Provide a better and a timely support service to the customers.
v. Better rankings and appropriate search results in public search
engines and enterprise search engines.
vi. 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/<langugecode> /… 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:
a. Reuse existing original language content and localize
i. 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.

ii. 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Standards surrounding localization (XLIFF) for exchanging

translatable data. XLIFF stands for XML Localization Interchange
File Format.

• 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
i. Analyses the content (if required)
ii. Selects translation Agency in TW and initiate
4. TW begins translation job
i. 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
i. Agency access TW gets the content
ii. 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