Simply put: expect change.

Sometimes a parts vendor alters the equipment design. Oftentimes, errors or malfunctions are not evident until testing and modeling, or once customer use reveals them. Always, someone is revising, improving, increasing performance. Whatever the source, Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) are an essential part of the development process. In fact, a third of them are considered critical and endanger the overall success of the project, according to a study in Denmark.

Unfortunately, they’re also costly. The study also finds that engineering changes occupy almost one third of the total R&D capacity. INSEAD research in “Managing the Process of Engineering Change Orders” reiterates the drain ECOs have on resources, citing that they consume 30-50% of engineering capacity and 20-50% of tool costs.

It’s not only an expensive process, it also consumes the valuable time and talent of testing, engineering and operations groups, taking them away from higher-value activities. Continuous revision simultaneously improves product development and impedes the process.

How can you streamline the process of engineering change orders to reduce costs and cycle time?

The main principles of ECO management are both engineering-driven (e.g. preventing unnecessary changes, reducing the impact of ECOs, detecting problems early) and process-driven (speeding up the flow). Let’s focus the latter – managing and coordinating the complex decision and support process.

The longer it takes to implement a change, the larger the negative effects on the project. Thus the overarching strategy should be to address the top issues that impede the handling of engineering changes:

• Simplify the number of people involved – the more involved, the higher the propensity for error
• Establish a structure for approval, implementation, and execution of process
• Ensure enough decision-support
• Create a system for prioritizing changes
• Support the process with adequate resources – knowledge-base, staff, etc.
• Communicate between departments – Manufacturing, Purchasing, Customer Support, etc.
• Pay attention to the voice of the customer – and incorporate it
• Create top management awareness of the importance of engineering changes

While these strategies effectively improve the Engineering Change Order process, they require a certain amount of organizational change and the bandwidth to implement and maintain them. The reality is that most teams have a shortage of staff with the appropriate skills and time for ECO management. Many organizations are turning to outsourcing to eliminate the burden of change orders on their team and ensure that the above actions are achieved.

What in your current workflow process can you outsource?

Cut your ECO costs and cycle-time by 50%.

Lionbridge RevSource℠ is designed to support the entire change order process and give your engineers the time to focus on actual engineering work. Lionbridge’s team of experts includes engineers, technical writers, and project managers that provide a wide range of technical data revision services.  The five-step RevSource℠ process breaks down the total percentage of work from start to finish, saving you time and money.

Learn more about outsourcing engineering design and drafting.

As the translation industry continues to grow in 2013, so does the technology that drives it. Clients and developers select the tools easiest to use and most efficient to their production. Users will need to learn to embrace and sell these technologies with a new mindset, and developers are excited to dive in and elevate technology to the next level.

There are however, misconceptions and questions that arise in the realm of translation technology, especially machine translation (MT). At first glance MT derives at more questions than answers: Will the content be translated accurately? What are the dangers? Is a human translator more reliable than a machine? Karen Netto with Anglicity gives guidance on which way to turn when it comes to machine translation in her recent blog post, “Translation Industry at the Crossroads.”

Netto alludes to how clients who want a fast, responsive service, which human translators can’t meet, also want high quality, creative marketing copy, which machine translation can’t meet. Clients and developers alike find themselves at the “crossroad,” yearning for a happy medium between the two means- fast service and creative copy. In Netto’s reasoning, it is crucial that developers listen to their clients and aim to create new, more intelligent technologies that meet the demand.

Although there is much chatter around the use of MT, Lionbridge has focused efforts on supplying an automated solution for large content volumes. Smart Automated Translation (SAT) combines machine translation with human post-editing to deliver efficiency and rapid turnaround time. SAT provides an affordable solution for translating tens-of-thousands to millions of words into multiple languages, and allows you to stay within budget. It is not a fit for creative marketing copy, but it’s a leap forward from MT that may be right for your content.

To learn more about SAT: visit www.smartautomatedtranslation.com.

Lionbridge recently helped HP develop an app using this cutting edge technology to better assist consumers. The app not only helps consumers discover how to work their HP printer, but it creates a better learning experience for the user – a very attractive selling point in today’s global technology market. The use of augmented reality technology with HP’s new tool rids long, wordy manuals while saving printing costs and displaying visually pleasing 3D imagery. Check out a sneak peak of HP’s new app.

Lionbridge will be at the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas with HP to present this interactive technology. Come join us at the Austin Convention Center on March 12 to find out more about augmented reality.

For more information about the South by Southwest conference, visit: http://bit.ly/X9S4vj

The arm wrestle over the best approach to translation continues. Quality and the endless pursuit of perfect linguistic expression remain the highest standard of translation offerings.  This standard is essential to specific content types, especially those that define a brand and its global impact.  But, changing market trends and new ways for customers to interact with brands (i.e., blog posts, user reviews, chat sessions, etc.) are driving the need for Language Service Providers to offer more types of translation to customers.

Ensuing from the explosion of emerging markets (particularly Asia and Brazil in Latin America) is the increase in user-generated content and the steadily rising demand for more communication in non-European languages. These markets have significantly lower English proficiency than their European and US counterparts, and global business leaders finally understand they can no longer afford not to speak to customers and employees in these countries. This of course brings forth a challenge; quick production of localized content at an affordable price – feel that press?

Machine translation, with advanced TM technology and the right process, could be the best-matched answer. Wayne Bourland, Director of Translation at Dell, recently blogged about this very dilemma: Leaders facing a choice between paying top yen for “risk aversion” or taking an affordable route that may have a few bumps in it. Bourland’s conclusion: “I haven’t spoken to a single executive who wasn’t willing to accept a quality excursion or two for a dramatic reduction in cost.”

We are hearing much of the same. More and more of our clients are demanding lower-cost translation options for quality-lenient content. Lionbridge is answering with Smart Automated Translation (SAT), an innovative new method of translating a growing type of content that would otherwise be cost prohibitive to publish. This process uses technology tools to break document files into strings and combine like strings before machine translating them. What results is a project with fewer overall words and fewer file management requirements. A specialized human post-editing round, based on content type and topic, also adds to the efficiency and quality of the SAT process.

So to win the translation match in these growing economies, SAT may be the best balanced solution, just put some muscle to it! …Well that’s just ironic-it’s automated….

To learn more about SAT, visit www.smartautomatedtranslation.com

The vulnerability of passengers and customers lies in the lack of control. For airplanes, it’s a simple picture; most passengers cannot fly a plane themselves and their lives depend on the safety of the aircraft. For language services, the risk is not nearly as dramatic, but it is still quite emotional, “desire (like we all do) not to look foolish or embarrass [your] company, and keep [your] jobs… while not having the ability to assess the results [yourself].” A machine will not even blush for you should you happen to burn through most of your budget auto-translating product documentation , only to discover it’s unintentionally offensive; or worse yet, a safety liability.

One important point Kevin did not fully drive home is that we don’t always fly when we travel—that is to say, not all content has the same significance or risk associated with it. Technical documentation is one type of content we hear our customers are putting on the back burner. Not because it’s not important, but because the buyer is focused on budget, and technical documentation, with its high word counts, can be expensive to translate.

We have a solution that addresses this cost concern. It sits between human translation and pure machine translation. Smart Automated Translation (SAT) combines processing tools, machine translation and light post-editing to produce significant cost savings and reduced cycle times for high-volume content. This solution takes advantage of innovative language technology tools and has the right dose of human review to produce publishable results.

I’m saying it with the masses: I will not get on a plane without a pilot. I have, however, ridden from one airport terminal to another on a fully automated train, which goes to show that for every situation there is a right approach.

Content development and localization professionals need to make savvy purchasing decisions around translation, weighing their specific project needs and content types against the various translation methods available to them. While some materials are perfectly suited for machine translation and don’t require any fine tuning, other content may need human translation to truly convey the intended message in a culturally appropriate way. Then, there is the whole spectrum in between.

Our recommendation for clients facing this dilemma is to review their content and think about: “What level of translation does my content require?”

Specifically, a new Smart Automated Translation (SAT) approach is bringing value for companies looking to translate technical content in large volumes. SAT combines processing tools, machine translation and light post-editing to produce significant cost savings and reduced cycle times for certain content types.

We’d love to hear from you about the ways you classify your content for translation. Is it based on audience exposure? Volume? Budget? Other factors?

As leading brand companies look to drive traffic to their global sites, increase customer engagement, and ultimately convert revenue, the necessity for streamlining digital operations is mission critical.

Yet, digital content ownership often rests with corporate localization departments who are organized in non-Marketing functions, or may lack campaign-specific expertise, or are focused solely on cost reduction as opposed to revenue uplift.  Or, perhaps this process management resides with outside digital agencies who excel at creative and strategy, yet are out of their comfort zone when it comes to global workflow and resource management. Add to the mix stakeholders across the world and traditional translation management systems focused on cost reduction, as opposed to revenue uplift.  Managing global marketing operations can be overwhelming!

In working with Lionbridge’s broad portfolio of digital marketing customers, it’s so rewarding to transition from conversations focused on cost avoidance/reduction to ideation around Revenue Uplift and Customer Engagement.  The challenge of ensuring the trickle-down from top-level strategy to day-to-day execution is daunting.  Add to this traditional localization paradigms and technologies, and it becomes evident that new ways of thinking is a must.

We’re all at an exciting vantage point, where traditional localization paradigms and cutting-edge digital marketing operations are converging.  Companies are not alone if they’re struggling to ‘forcefit’ dynamic digital content and assets into traditional localization processes or systems. It seems to be an area ripe for Lean Six Sigma-based principals to identify “waste” and unnecessary touch points, combined with digital thought leadership. On September 27, Lionbridge will sponsor a Council to bring together Digital Operations professionals from a variety of companies. Please join us at Intel’s Global HQ in Santa Clara, CA for thought-provoking discussion and networking.

A Specific Example
If localization versus translation still seems like an abstract concept, let’s drill down into a specific example to see what can happen. Suppose your marketing team is starting a product promotion. Your recently hired graphic designer has been tasked with creating some visual assets to support the promo — this would include a microsite, banners and so on. Unfortunately an oversight has been discovered; in this case a small piece of content was not captured in the original translation request. One of the required banners needs the following text:

Deadline for submissions:
May 15

Since deadlines loom large, your new designer would like to build the banner quickly and move on, rather than make a request for more translations and wait for turnaround. She’s checked the previous project archives, or the translation memory, and found translations for “Deadline for submissions”. A shortcut at this point seems tempting. She only needs to gather translations for the month name (Google translate, perhaps?), drop that in place of “May” and the task is done, right?

No. In context, the translation needs more work to be rendered properly. Why? Because in certain languages, the word order, punctuation, capitalization or other attributes need to be localized in the correct style. For German, Spanish and Chinese, the designer’s cobbled translations for “May 15” will look like this:

DE: Mai 15
ES: Mayo 15
ZH: 5月 15

But the correct forms in fact look like this:

DE: 15. Mai (number comes before month, and also requires a dot after)
ES: 15 de Mayo (number comes before month, and “de” [of] precedes month name)
ZH: 5月 15日 (requires the “day” [日] character after the date number)

These arcane details of language matter. Errors in multilingual content will negatively affect your company’s image, and can ultimately erode consumer confidence and revenue.
I can think of an actual campaign I worked on where an ad offered customers the chance to “Win $10,000!” A Spanish version was hastily constructed, with first version reading “Gana $10,000!” Can you guess why this would be a problem? Because unlike English, the Spanish number punctuation rules use a comma where our decimal point would be, and vice versa. The text essentially offered the promise to “Win $10!” Not a very enticing statement, is it? The banner should have shown “Gana $10.000!”

Takeaway: Design with style
Design and production issues such as above can be mitigated through the creation and sharing of style guides. For my team I have created a few “cheat sheets” showing clear examples of how common text elements should be rendered in each of the languages offered on our website. The scope includes number formatting, date formatting, punctuation spacing, punctuation placement, capitalization rules and other attributes. With resources like this close at hand, designers can produce multilingual content with speed and confidence. The resulting quality improvements and insulation from localization gaffes make things better for everyone, not to mention the company’s bottom line.

Next steps
Look at your current multilingual content development process, and think about what happens after translation assets are handed off for design and production. What file formats are you working with? Which of your supported languages seem to present more challenges? What are the typical errors that pop up during QA? Where do they get introduced? How much copy-paste work is involved in the process? How sensitive are your team members to localization issues generally?

Answering these questions will define the scope and information required for your style guides. Creating the guides will take time. You will probably need to go and do some homework just to find out what the correct standards are. Bringing your designers up to speed on your requirements will take time too, and they will likely need reminders along the way. The destination, however, is worth the effort. When projects are running more smoothly, completing faster, with less QA friction, you’ll be glad you did.

Gareth Morgan has over 12 years of experience in communications: print and digital media, advertising, brand development, marketing strategy and more. He is currently managing multilingual website content and marketing communications for an international e-finance company with a customer base in 180 countries worldwide. Gareth spent 8 years living and working professionally in Asia, where he learned fluent spoken Mandarin Chinese.

I work as a localization manager in the marketing department of a financial services company. A big part of my job is gathering documents for translation and then handing them off to our team of graphic designers for production. I’ve developed a keen understanding of the issues and headaches that come up after this hand off.If you’ve been tasked with handling a similar process, there are things you can do to reduce pain points and quality assurance issues before they happen.

Native vs. Proxy Formats

Before jumping in, let me say that a lot of these issues arise due to using proxy formats instead of native formats when sourcing translations. If you need to translate a web page, would you send your translation provider the final approved version in HTML format, or a Word doc with the final content? The Word doc would be the proxy option. By sending translation files in the native format, in this case HTML, your design teams would not have to undertake the significant copy-paste effort required to build the different language versions of your site. Working from native formats will save you time and hassle in the long run.

Workflows and Challenges
Nonetheless, each team sets up their production process a little differently, and there are cases where proxy formats need to be used. Many design teams tasked with building multilingual content assets routinely collect text from documents in one format and build in another. Then there are the frequent scope changes and late content additions to projects, often with text that wasn’t sent for translations in the original project bundle. If you are tasked with overseeing translation and localization quality, how can you set your team up for success?

Check back next week as Gareth continues the conversation with a specific localization demand example…

Gareth Morgan has over 12 years of experience in communications: print and digital media, advertising, brand development, marketing strategy and more. He is currently managing multilingual website content and marketing communications for an international e-finance company with a customer base in 180 countries worldwide. Gareth spent 8 years living and working professionally in Asia, where he learned fluent spoken Mandarin Chinese.

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