ECM Summit – some slides in multilingual intranets

EMC Summit Multilanguage English version

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ECM Summit – Day 1: Social Media in the Enterprise, Multilanguage Management

I could listen to four case studies on two topics today.

Xonio.com presented it’s social media activities. Xonio is a B2C-portal focusing on mobilephones other mobile hardware stuff, mostly publishing testing reports.

Actually, they summarize almost everything in the social media topic: comments, boards, rss, even emailsupport for users.

Multilingual Sites – designing custom solutions

We look at multilingual sites as a matter of workflow and technical problems. That’s not everything, we also have a lot of social and political issues.

How are they connected?

That also depends on what kind of multilingual sites we are talking:

Multilingual Sites – the untranslatable

There are several reasons why some contents can not be translated:

• specific terms
• specific languages (english, russian, latin)
• multimedia – pictures, video, audio
• you would not understand it anyway: “is your birthday calendar really the high priority content for the intranet-homepage?”

Hierarchical terms that denominate positions that do not exist in other countries, popular terms that are hard to understand for non native speakers and even harder to translate – both are great in creating identity, they are entertaining and they are good means of communication.
But they are also tools to exclude others: That’s our thing, we say that, you don’t have to bother. You can no and should not get rid of this on a local level, but you can not use it if acting internationally; you have to neutralize yourself (one common way: just talk broken english – as I am doing it here – nothing will be perfect;; everybody will understand… )

Sometimes, it’s not the language, but the attitude that can’t be translated.
The further east I go the more I am impressed by how important birthdays and namedays are in many cee-cultures. – That must be highly fertile area for any social media services, but it’s very hard to integrate warmest wishes into business-style intranets as we know them. As prime content on the portal homepage, notabene.

A third quite special case are pictures, video- and audiofiles. Metadata can either be translated or use common language so that it’s easier to argue about, captions and other supporting texts are also easy to translate.
Pictures should be general, but actually they are not. Pictures tell a lot about tradition, power and personal views, and that is closely related to local views and traditions. A western CEO may want to visualize cooperation, openness and friendliness, an  eastern CEO may rather want to represent strength, wealth and power. Western users will understand the strength-image as something oldfashioned, maybe even threatening. Eastern users may interpret open friendliness as weakness.
A universal picture language will end up being just boring. So this has to be handled somewhere else, it’s a mainly cultural and political matter where official media can only support.

Videos strongly transport values and identity. Use them only, if your plan is really clear – or if your actors are great. Information-driven videos that contain a lot of explanations can synchronised; vox pops or interviews should never be completely synchronised. That will just destroy their actual value. 
To summarize: I feel more and more that multilingual sites are not a matter of translation, workflows, contentmanagement or menus, but they interfere a lot with cultural and political values in the enterprise, they have a high impact on information architecture – and they are one of the big cost drivers for portals.

Multilingual Sites – The impact of Information Architecture (and the other way round)

Where do you make the difference between different languages or different localizations of your site?

I think we can assume that there ist actually very little information that is really the same and will be reused all over; most of the contents will have some local variations.
If you think of a site containing product information, the products may be similar in different countries, but they will have different names (what requires different pictures), different selling propositions and different terms and conditions. That reduces the reuse quite a lot.
Company information on the other hand should not allow any variations: If an international company is addressing it’s audience – no matter if customers, employees or investors – the message must be consistent and uniformous. There should be no local influence and no chance for local stakeholders to change or delay that information.
Nevertheless, this information should find it’s way to the audience like any other information, it should not be published in specific exile-sections.

So where to make the difference between local and international contents, between translated and native, between local-language-only and mandatory to be translated contents, how to display that so that the user does not get confused?
Actually,it’s easy: the user should not notice any difference.
So the difference should not be named, it should not be part of the menu,it should not make the user think about local or international contents – all contents should just be there.

 

Having a menu entry labeled “International” would require to translate everything in there – that means you have to enter enough content to make it an entry of it’s own, to translate everything and to think about reasons why certain contents are part of the international section and not of the other local channels. Maybe you will end up with having the contents in both places – that’s the best way to kill your international section.

So be careful with emphasizing multilingual features and translations, don’t make the user think about it – but invest a lot of thought in what and how to translate.

Multilingual Sites – Beyond Workflows

 When asked for multilingual features, skills and experiences, experts, consultants and tool-providers are quick to present workflows and other technical solutions.

What we know now for sure is

• there are cms- and portal solutions who bring translation-workflows out of the box
• there are best practices for handling translations, including the management of translators, change notifications and versioning
• there will be a good technical case-study for every issue we may come up with

 

Does this really answer all questions? What actually are multilingual sites?

Multilingual sites are pages that present content in different languages; some of ythese contents will be the same in all languages. That requires translation.

Pages that display different contents, are actually not multilingual sites – they are just different websites.

So one big criteria for multilingual sites is translation – and it is one big challenge to decide which contents should be translated.

In a multinational company, translation is not only a matter of cost, but also of politics and strategy: what does it mean to translate, why is it done, what are the targets? There are several possibilities:

• be close to the employees; don’t create a distance to internationally relevant information
• keep the barriers as low as possible
• ensure that all employees have the same chance to understand
• touch people in their direct environments
• give employees the right terms for their future conversation with colleagues, customers and other local environments
   

These criteria are to be applied differently, depending from

• who is talking? an international headquarter or a local subsidiary?
• who is addressed? locally or internationally woprking employees?
• what other environments are relevant? what languages do they speak?
   

That creates a matrix that can help to decide which translations are really necessary, which can be avoided because they dont fit the criteria and which have to be done even though may not seem to be the most important ones at first glance.

 

Multilingual Sites

Andreas Ravn from namics.com just gave an interesting speech at Web2Expo in Berlin.

Some points that are remarkable to me: abbreviations, tag clouds, words without context are specific issues in multilingual environments. It’s an additional challenge to actually identify the language.

Good or bad translation affects the author’s credibility – that can be your own, if you are centrally talking to an international audience. Or it can be your partner’s (and your author is your partner – or maybe even your customer) credibility; that means high responsibility.
It’s not only about credibility, it’s also about confidence, like and dislike, authority and reputation and respect – especially if you are an international enterprise talking to it’s multilingual employees.
I should try to draw a model capturing and illustrating these complexities.

Several approaches to deal with the multilingual challenge are:
* laissez faire: contributors choose their language according to whom they want to talk. That’s only feasible if you’re working in a very decentralized environment and can afford to loos control.
* common ground: pick one language (eg english, or russian or spanish) and stick to it – the common thing then will be, that it’s strange for everybody. It makes a big difference in this concept, if you have native speakers in the community or not; that also makes a big difference between the US and Europe.

One point I want to add, especially from the intranet point of view: Intranets are nowadays always user generated content.
That needs to be respected
* in creating the CMS and other means to create, deliver and manage content
* in talking to the authors and other contributors
* in considering language issues

That adds up to a multidimensional model of influences and dependencies:
who created the content (“professional” author, part-time contributor; headquarter representative, local employee; manager, expert…)
whom does the content address (local – international clientel; mandatory or optional information)
references: other contents (are they translated?), applications; what is the desired output (eg. prepare customer letters – use the correct wording in the local language)
communication clouds: who is talking how about this topic? where do you need a common language (application users and helpdesk, retail sales and customers, sales and controlling etc.) – sometimes translation can be an obstacle in understanding… (what does “preferences” mean in ukrainian? or romanian?’

The main question is actually: What is it we should translate?
Then you can answer the question how to translate, how to handle this process.