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Warsaw 2006
Europe’s Eastern Frontier
Doing Business in an Expanding Europe
InterContinental Hotel, Warsaw, Poland
13-17 November 2006
The expansion of the European Union has made Central and Eastern Europe increasingly important, both as a market for goods and services and as a low-cost location for globalization outsourcing and production. This year’s annual European meeting of the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) will focus on the opportunities and challenges associated with this region’s rapid growth and newfound prominence.
As the European Union works through the historical and regulatory challenges associated with economic consolidation and growth, this ground-breaking conference will address localization business issues specific to the region’s legal, banking, life sciences, manufacturing, IT/Telco, government and multimedia industries. Special attention will be given to language and translation technologies in web development, content production, management and distribution.
What Makes a Company Global? Globalizing Adobe and its software: Standards, best practices and global customer support
Warren Peet - Senior Engineering Manager, Adobe
Adobe has traditionally ‘invented’ its way out of tight spots, and globalization is no different. Peet will share how Adobe has grown into a multinational and multibillion dollar corporation by surviving the unavoidable growth pains – and subsequently experiencing astonishing growth gains – through designing innovative solutions for the most challenging aspects of creating, marketing and supporting Adobe’s high quality products worldwide.
Case Study: Multilingual Product Information Management: How HP EMEA IMS succeeded in the Globalization of its Product Information to support Sales Activities in 35 countries.
Laurent Chataing - Consultant in the Application and Content, Hewlett Packard
Arnaud Daix - Manager of ACG, Worldwide, Hewlett Packard
Flavio Zanetti - EMEA IMS Translation & Localisation Program Manager, Hewlett Packard
The HP Team will share the challenges and solutions involved in successfully managing the content life cycle for more than 35 countries on hp.com. They will cover Product Information Management (PIM), content globalization, automated generation of offline publications and centralized management of country e-catalogs and share their key success factors and pending improvements.
Online Communities: Creating a Global Support Environment
Karen Eden - Knowledge Development Director, Global Industries Business Unit, Oracle Corporation
Karen Eden has recently taken ownership to deploy Global Industry Communities and Communications for the newly formed Global Industries Business Unit in Oracle. Professional Communities at Oracle usually focus on a particular product, product family or industry. The concept of working virtually – be it geographically, culturally or organizationally – drives the way Oracle operates today. Communities provide a self-governed, non-hierarchical virtual home base where a ‘common language’ and ‘method’ transcend other dynamics and complexities to enable people to develop and learn. Bringing together ‘people, knowledge and know-how,’ they provide a fast track to solve problems and establish better practices. Karen Eden will outline how communities provide a solid base to work from, drive sales and offer value during times of acquisitions and organizational change.
Product Localization QA Process as It Pertains to Outsourcing: Facilitated by Symantec Localization Quality Assessment Team Leaders
Ken O’Brien - SQA Engineer, Symantec Corporation
Tommy McShane - Localization QA Director, Symantec Corporation
Over the last number of years, Symantec has increasingly focused on outsourcing the QA of our localized products. This approach has prompted a number of changes in our QA Process for us to work more effectively with our service providers. This workgroup session gives us an opportunity to share the Symantec experience of outsourcing with participants.
This session will also present an opportunity to have an open and frank discussion with other companies on how they approach QA outsourcing and the challenges they have experienced; where they outsource to, what processes and technologies they have in place to manage the workload of these service providers, and the extent of the outsourcing model they use.
XTRF – New Global Management System for Translation Agencies
Andrew Nedoma - Partner, Development and Technologies, LIDO-LANG Technical Translations
Tomasz Mroz - Sales Manager, LIDO-LANG Technical Translations
Lido-Lang recently developed, implemented and introduced to the market XTRF, a new global management system for translation agencies. Built with cutting-edge Java technology, XTRF is flexible, customizable and web-based, enabling web access for company’s suppliers and customers. It is designed to help translation companies streamline all of their daily activities. It guarantees smoother workflow and the reduction of administrative costs at the same time. Project management, invoicing, quotations, ISO 9001 reports and CRM are the main areas covered by the system. Designed by translation and localization professionals and created by an excellent IT team, this powerful tool will reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks and increase a company’s effectiveness.
Case Study: The Evolving Terminology Management Challenges Confronting the EU’s New-Entry Markets
Laura Vrabie - Manager of the Technical Assistance Office for the Translation Coordination Unit, European Institute of Romania
The EIR’s Translation Coordination Unit is the organization responsible in Romania for endorsing the official version of translated European Community legislation. The translated acts will have the same legal power as the acts drawn up in the other official languages of the European Union. Laura Vrabie will discuss the challenges faced due to sheer volume (around 100,000 OJ pages), terminology, tools and quality assurance.
Introducing the New SDL Trados Synergy 2006 Incorporating SDL PerfectMatch™
Helene Wirkus - Sales Manager, SDL International
Vendor Management Best Practice: The Client Perspective
Václav Mikeš - Localization Manager, Grisoft
Janaina Wittner - Regional Manager Central & Eastern Europe, WHP
The maturity and the new technologies of our industry have helped it move away from the “all in house” model to an outsourced one. Whether we are clients of localization services, multi-lingual or single vendors, we are all involved in managing external resources. There is really no “one best way” to do it. There are however Vendor Management practices that optimize resources and client experience. Vendor Selection, Vendor Evaluation, Vendor Retention and Development are the keys, but how can they actually be put into practice? This presentation will answer all your questions.
Translation as an Element of Localization
Lior Cohen - VP Marketing and Sales, Net-Translators Ltd.
Lior Cohen will present the entire localization process with an emphasis on translation as a part of the process, rather than as a standalone element.
Managing Multicultural, Multisite Teams Using Web Technology
Katherine Brown - Principal, Comgenesis, LLC and Associate Fellow in STC
During a project, teams produce volumes of information that must be managed and accessed by all members, regardless of physical location. In addition, geographically dispersed teams rarely have the opportunity to meet in person, and so must identify other ways to work efficiently. Kit Brown will discuss ways that managers can use web technology to build team rapport and to assess project needs. Attendees will leave the session with 3 ideas for managing their virtual teams and project information more effectively, and will have a greater understanding of the role that culture plays in team dynamics.
Integrating Localization into the Client’s Software Development Process
Vitaly Borok - CEO, Multilize
Vitaly Brook will describe an approach for directly integrating the localization company into the software development process as an external team member. This approach enables a shorter time-to-market and allows for simultaneous releases in multiple languages. Vitaly will also analyze the advantages and pitfalls of this distributed localization and development model and provide a case study for the approach.
Globalization: The Opportunity Case in Poland and the Central European Region and the Role that Localization Plays
Agnieszka Hein - Managing Body, Polish Association Of Translation Agencies
Stanislaw Staruch - Managing Director, Unicorn IT
Alison Toon - Translation and Localization Manager, Content Management Services, Hewlett Packard
This session gives an overview of globalization in Poland and in the Central European region. The main sectors covered will be IT, Telcos and government with respect to globalization consulting and product localization and translation services.
Alison Toon shares her views of doing buisness in Central Europe from a global content management perspective. Agnieszka Hein, in her capacity as President of the Polish Association of Translation Companies, will address the challenges posed by the globalization industry in terms of the European Quality Standards for translation services. Stanislaw Staruch will provide market demographics in the context of economies, cultural diveristy and localization opportunities.
Discussion will focus on the impact that globalization services and the internet have on local companies, the expansion of content coverage, the role that quality metrics play and the practical issues associated with a quality standard. The panel will address questions like: Is a globalized approach to localization a sign that it is the end of this industry? What differentiates doing business in Poland or Central Europe versus the rest of the world? What processes help with ever-increasing contnet and translation volumes? What content should be created in these countries rather than translated or localized?
LISA’s Open Standards: Today’s Applications in Industry, Academia and Government Worldwide
Arle Lommel (LISA/OSCAR) and Andrzej Zydroń (XML International), presenting on behalf of Gerhard Budin - Professor of Department of Translation & Interpretation, University of Vienna
Localization standards must fulfill a range of practical requirements from the perspectives of usability, flexibility, interoperability, etc. Standards organization and standards initiatives are increasingly ready to cooperate to enable their standards to directly respond to real industry needs. Gerhard Budin will focus on how to leverage successful standards such as TMX and TBX in a global economy with new users and stakeholders. He will recommend that LISA take a leading role in further developing localization standards, together with ISO and other organizations.
“Decompose Your Computer”: The Impact of Translation Quality on International Sales
Arle Lommel - Publications Manager, LISA
Kenneth McKethan - Globalization Project Manager, IBM
Volkmar Burke Siegemund - Internationalization Engineer, IBM
What message do you convey to your international customers when your products show obvious localization or linguistic errors, even if the product works as intended? In many instances, companies tolerate problems in localized versions of their products that would be seen as embarrassing if they appeared in English. Data from the LISA Global Software Survey showed that poor localization quality can serve as a significant barrier to international sales and business. Sandy McKethan and Volkmar Burke Sigemund (IBM) and Arle Lommel (LISA), who were responsible for this survey, will discuss the impact of localization quality on international sales, examine the effects of not fully globalizing business processes on support and customer retention, and offer practical suggestions as to how organizations can help remedy lost sales and other problems caused by poor localization.
In addition, Arle Lommel will discuss more recent market data from a third party that confirms that localization quality plays a major role in determining software purchases in non-English markets.
Implementing Localization Workflow: A Focus on Pan-European Product and Language Resource Management
Salome Lopez-Lavado - Translation Manager, Sony Europe
Salome Lopez-Lavado will share a case study on the implementation of a translation workflow system within the professional division of Sony UK Ltd. She will discuss all of the steps that Sony took before implementing this system, and about the immediate advantages that it brought to their translation, proofreading and publishing processes. With over 400 internal and external users, the workflow system has become one of the most used tools within the company. It has also saved the company thousands of euros through better reuse of translation memories (TMs) and decreased time for proofreading/checking.
Telecom and Radio Compliance in the Global Environment
Alain Delaunay - Corporate Hardware Compliance Project Manager, IBM
Alain Delaunay will define hardware product compliance and how it applies to telecom and radio compliance. Issues include product design, wireless frequency allocation plans, the certification process, country certification versus US/FCC and EU approval, customer trials and solutions for compliance coverage.
Lingotek Language Search Engine
Tim Hunt - Founder and CEO, Lingotek, Inc.
Tim Hunt will introduce the Language Search Engine, a new translation technology developed by Lingotek, Inc. Although this new technology can be used with TM tools, it has the potential to make them obsolete. This online service enables Google-like, meaning-based searching between all language pairs to find any combination of words, including repeat sentences.
An ROI Case Study: Customizing Localization Workflow for Global Business Support
Krzysztof Jozefowicz - Manager of European Localization Center, SAS Institute
Krzysztof Jozefowicz will propose that developing your own custom localization workflow solution can be an inexpensive alternative to commercial software. He shares how and why the SAS European Localization Center developed its own custom localization workflow, rather than adopt an off-the-shelf solution. Focusing on the financial aspects, Jozefowicz will discuss the original challenges, the decision making process, the implementation phase and full production.
Language Processing Standards: Existing and Future Manifestations of TMX, TBX, SRX, and GMX
Rodolfo M. Raya - Director of Product Development, Heartsome Holdings PL Singapore
Andrzej Zydroń - CTO, XML-INTL
Rodolfo Raya and Andrzej Zydroń will provide an overview of the pivotal role of LISA’s OSCAR, followed by a critical analysis and evaluation of existing versions of open standards managed by OSCAR. They will discuss how to improve these open standards to truly provide valuable advantages and benefits to the localization and translation community, along with a preview of forthcoming new versions.
Optimizing the Cost for Translation and Localization
Irina Niculiu - Marketing Manager, altalingua EES
It used to be that the emphasis in our industry was on delivering the best possible quality with decreased turnaround times. Today, we face the same two challenges, along with the added dimension of ensuring cost-effectiveness. Irina Niculiu will address the solutions reached at altalingua EES to provide the best overall business value to its customers: improved efficiency and a more competitive end-product to deliver the best return on a customer’s investment. The company is focused on providing powerful integrated solutions for content localization and supporting companies to reduce the cost of reaching markets worldwide.
How to Run a Globalization Audit of Your Business Processes
Rebecca Ray - Managing Editor and Consulting Partner, LISA
Globalizing a company’s business processes requires the creative and efficient management of human capital in order to get it right. In many markets and industry sectors, it’s no longer good enough to tailor your original processes as international expansion takes place. Your competition can do that. What is required is for you to really analyze the process in question and determine how to implement it as you compete globally. Rebecca Ray will guide you through the process of setting up your own Globalization Audit. The goals of the audit are (1) to increase your competitive flexibility and (2) to provide specific strategies that will allow you to provide higher quality support to your key customers as they expand into new markets.
DITA and xml:tm – Automating Language Processing to Solve Business Problems
Wojtek Jȩczalik - Technical Director, XML-INTL
Wojtek Jȩczalik will explain why xml:tm (XML-based text memory) is a proposed LISA OSCAR standard (and also a companion for the OASIS DITA standard) that is set to revolutionize the way that XML documents are authored and translated.
First Automated QA Tool for Languages with Flexions
Dmitry Karpachev - Lead Project Manager and Quality Manager, Integrated Language Solutions
Identifying translation errors and inconsistent terminology use is not only a prerequisite for high-quality localization of products, but also one of the means to reduce the editing and proofreading costs within the localization process and to meet tight deadlines. Integrated Language Solutions has developed Integrated Language Checker (ILC), the first QA tool that can detect terminology errors for inflected languages. It’s a big problem for existing QA tools to check consistent use of terminology against a glossary because hundreds of false errors will be generated due to the inflections. ILC solves this problem very smoothly and painlessly. It also has many other useful features, e.g., internal and external tag checking, inconsistent translation of equal segments, numbers checking, punctuation mark discrepancies and more.
Using Technology to Go Global - The Case in Favour
Peter Reynolds - Director of the LSP Advantage Program, Idiom Technologies
Those involved at every stage of the localization value chain will recognize that they are constantly being asked to do the impossible: Deliver more, better quality, faster and for less than it cost the last time with the same headcount. How can organisations consistently deliver against these objectives? Only by using smart technology, streamlined processes and improving collaboration is this possible. This presentation will highlight the issues that are involved in delivering global content in a demanding marketplace. The technologies which can help deliver this will be discussed. The term Globalization Management System (GMS) will be clearly defined and the presentation will highlight how such systems can address the end-end globalization supply chain and successfully deliver against this “apparent contradiction”.
The presentation will also look at how Idiom is working with partners including localization companies to provide greater access to this technology.
GMX – How and Why This Open-Source Standard will Change the Globalization Industry
Bartosz Bogacki - Technical Director, XML-INTL
GMX (Global Information Management Metrics eXchange) is a suite of proposed LISA OSCAR standards that allow for the precise definition of the scale of a localization task. GMX-V covers Volume, GMX-C covers Complexity and GMX-Q covers Quality. GMX-V defines an XML vocabulary for exchanging volume information for a given localization task. It is also the first industry standard to define in a verifiable manner the word and character counts for a given electronic document. GMX-V is currently available for public comment. Bogacki will provide precise details about GMX-V and how to implement the standard.
The LISA Accreditation Program for Localization Service Companies
Moderated by Michael Anobile - Managing Director, LISA
Eric Nicod - Global Manager, Software Localization Services, Logitech
Arnaud Daix - Manager of ACG, Worldwide, Hewlett Packard
Klaus Ahrend - Head of External Translations, DGT of the European Commission
Israel Gidali - Globalization Manager, IBM GCoC- CTL, IBM
Research shows that the localization industry continues to expand across all public and private sectors. Each time a new product/service is released, an old one is updated, or a new technology is created, it will eventually (and probably much sooner rather than later) be offered in more than one language/culture. Add to this the increase in government regulations worldwide to legislate policies that ensure access to products and services that reflect local languages, cultures and business conventions. According to Bill Sullivan, LISA Chief Strategist and Globalization Executive at IBM, “it is no longer a matter of deciding whether to increase one’s global business revenue by investing in localization, it is a matter of survival. Therefore, no one can really predict the size of this market, or how fast it will grow.”
However, there is a problem with this rosy growth picture. With the continued consolidation within the industry, the localization buyer is often left wondering what remains of a former provider’s quality, capability and service. And uninformed buyers are at even more of a loss, since localization is a rather complicated workflow process - it’s not the same as finding the cheapest source for a given widget. It’s more akin to identifying and engaging the appropriate legal counsel or advertising agency. This means that the service provider selection process often takes too much time, is too complicated and must be repeated from time to time. In addition, new tools and processes are constantly introduced in this technology-laden industry, causing much confusion for government and private enterprise buyers. Obviously, this undermines the value of services provided.
With all of this confusion and uncertainty, both public and private buyers continue to approach LISA for much-needed help and a neutral voice in this area. Buyers from the largest government organizations in the world, along with companies of all sizes in the private sector, continue to push for a neutral accreditation process to support their purchasing managers in this area. They also want someone with experience in developing language-related standards and workflow processes, to jump-start the process to arrive at the right accreditation program much faster.
LISA’s Accreditation Program will also support service providers by providing much needed insight and comparative analysis through the Accreditation Standard. This will enable these providers to compete on concrete measurements of capabilities and delivery of services, rather than on technical descriptions of what they do or claims that they are “simply the best”. Both buyers and service providers will be able to operate on the same set of criteria, making the purchasing process much more transparent.
As an internationally recognized standards body, LISA is perfectly positioned to meet this defined need by providing an accreditation program that will largely eliminate the guesswork in determining the appropriate service provider for a buyer.
