Like every conference in the past few years, AI was a major emphasis at tcworld in mid-November. With around 4,000 attendees and a huge trade show, tcworld is bigger than any of the North American technical documentation events. The program includes sessions in both English and German, and attendees come from all over the world.
Ready to see the business advantages of structured content in action? These case studies show how moving to structured content can reduce time-to-market, enable accelerated global content delivery, and deliver personalized outputs that improve user experiences.
How can global brands use AI in localization without losing accuracy, cultural nuance, and brand integrity? In this podcast, host Bill Swallow and guest Steve Maule explore the opportunities, risks, and evolving roles that AI brings to the localization process.
The most common workflow shift in translation is to start with AI output, then have a human being review some or all of that output. It’s rare that enterprise-level companies want a fully human translation. However, one of the concerns that a lot of enterprises have about using AI is security and confidentiality. We have some customers where it’s written in our contract that we must not use AI as part of the translation process. Now, that could be for specific content types only, but they don’t want to risk personal data being leaked. In general, though, the default service now for what I’d call regular common translation is post editing or human review of AI content. The biggest change is that’s really become the norm.
—Steve Maule, VP of Global Sales at Acclaro
CompTIA plays a pivotal role in the global technical ecosystem. As the largest vendor-neutral training and credentialing organization for technology professionals, CompTIA creates career-advancing opportunities across a wide range of disciplines—cybersecurity, infrastructure, data, and more.
With the support of Scriptorium and other partners, CompTIA consolidated fragmented workflows into a unified ecosystem for structured learning content. The transformation has improved production efficiency and allows CompTIA to deliver global content without pausing ongoing content production. Additionally, it allows instructional designers to invest in compelling learning experiences instead of spending their time manually formatting content.
In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow unpack the promise, pitfalls, and disruptive impact of AI on multilingual content. From pivot languages to content hygiene, they explore what’s next for language service providers and global enterprises alike.
Bill Swallow: I think it goes without saying that there’s going to be disruption again. Every single change, whether it’s in the localization industry or not, has resulted in some type of disruption. Something has changed. I’ll be blunt about it. In some cases, jobs were lost, jobs were replaced, new jobs were created. For LSPs, I think AI is going to, again, be another shift, the same that happened when machine translation came out. LSPs had to shift and pivot how they approach their bottom line with people. GenAI is going to take a lot of the heavy lifting off of the translators, for better or for worse, and it’s going to force a copy edit workflow. I think it’s really going to be a model where people are going to be training and cleaning up after AI.
Have you been asked to deliver your content in another language but don’t know where to begin? The decisions you make early on when designing and developing your content can make or break your translation and production processes. It’s very hard (and expensive) to make changes as you run into problems during translation or production. It’s even worse when the problems are discovered by the consumers!
Let’s begin with some definitions and then take a look at what you can do to prepare for localization and how translators perform their work.
In episode 179 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle share the inside scoop on how to write an effective request for a proposal (RFP) for content operations. They’ll discuss how RFPs are constructed and evaluated, strategies for aligning your proposal with organizational goals, how to get buy-in from procurement and legal teams, and more.
When it comes time to write the RFP, rely on your procurement team, your legal team, and so on. They have that expertise. They know that process. It’s a matter of pairing what you know about your requirements and what you need with their processes to get the better result.
— Alan Pringle
With English as my first (and only) language, and being a first-time visitor to the incredible country of Japan, I found several takeaways for creating content with translation in mind.
Plus, in this blog, you’ll find delicious pictures of world-class food. (Caution: may cause salivation and a desperate urge to buy a plane ticket. Or is that just me?)
Translation troubles? This podcast is for you! In episode 173 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Mike McDermott, Director of Language Services at MadTranslations, share strategies for overcoming common content localization challenges and unlocking new market opportunities.
Mike McDermott: It gets very cumbersome to continually do these manual steps to get to a translation update. Once the authoring is done, ideally you just send it right through translation and the process starts.
Bill Swallow: So from an agile point of view, I am assuming that you’re talking about not necessarily translating an entire publication from page one to page 300, but you’re saying as soon as a particular chunk of content is done and “blessed,” let’s say, by reviewers in the native language, then it can immediately go off to translation even if other portions are still in progress.
Mike McDermott: Exactly. That’s what working in this semantic content and these types of environments will do for a content creator. You don’t need to wait for the final piece of content to be finalized to get things into translation.
When organizations replatform from one content management system to another, unchecked technical debt can weigh down the new system. In contrast, strategic replatforming can be a tool for reducing technical debt. In episode 172 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow share how to set your replatforming project up for success.
Here’s the real question I think you have to ask before replatforming—is the platform actually the problem? Is it legitimately broken? As Bill said, has it evolved away from the business requirements to a point where it no longer meet your needs? Or there are some other questions to ask, such as, what are your processes around that platform? Do you have weird, annoying, and inefficient processes?
— Sarah O’Keefe
Technical debt, hereafter called “content debt,” is “the implied cost of future reworking required when choosing an easy but limited solution instead of a better approach that could take more time,” Wikipedia, “Technical debt.”. Like financial debt, content debt isn’t always a bad thing. You can use a loan to buy a house right away (at least in the U.S.) and then pay off the debt over time while living in the house. Content debt allows you to create something quickly instead of doing it exactly right and taking much longer.
Too much content debt, though, will hamstring your work. The trick is to find the Goldilocks solution.
In episode 170 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar dive into the world of content localization strategy. Learn about the obstacles organizations face from initial planning to implementation, when and how organizations should consider localization, localization trends, and more.
Localization is generally a key business driver. Are you positioning your products, services, what have you for one market, one language, and that’s all? Are you looking at diversifying that? Are you looking to expand into foreign markets? Are you looking to hit multilingual people in the same market? All of those factors. Ideally as a company, you’re looking at this from the beginning as part of your business strategy.
— Bill Swallow
In episode 154 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar discuss the similarities between the industry-disrupting innovations of machine translation and AI, lessons we learned from machine translation that we can apply to AI, and more.
“Regardless of whether you’re talking about machine translation or AI, don’t just run with whatever it provides without giving it a thorough check. The other thing that we’re seeing with AI that wasn’t so much an issue with machine translation is more of a concern around copyright and ownership.”
— Bill Swallow
You need to translate content into new languages, but it’s not happening fast enough. Projects are delayed, programs can’t launch, and you’re at a loss for how to fix it.
If you’re reading this post, you’ve been hearing about — or have at least heard of — a component content management system, or CCMS.
You’re probably dealing with increasing amounts of customer-facing content and localization requirements, and you’re wondering if a CCMS could help. Almost all of our projects involve CCMSs and scaling content operations to address these challenges.
A wise woman recently said, “replatforming structured content is annoying and expensive.” This is doubly so when it comes to localization.
Replatforming nearly always involves content change—the new system may store content differently or require a different format or structure. Although the changes may affect your existing localization process, some of these changes may be for the better.
Content operations (content ops or ContentOps ) refers to the system your organization uses to develop, deploy, and deliver customer-facing information. Rahel Bailie refers to it as the way that your organization operationalizes your content strategy.
Over at easyDITA, there’s a more aspirational definition, which includes the purpose of good content ops:
Content Operations — ContentOps — is the infrastructure that maximizes your content creators’ efforts and guards against procedural errors by automating as much of the content development process as possible.
With the holidays coming up, people start thinking about food and planning meals. The approach you take when preparing a holiday meal has a lot of similarities to a content strategy project.
You’ve deployed a successful content strategy for one department at your organization. How do you know you’re ready to take that strategy to the next level and expand it across the organization? Here are some common indicators that it’s time to develop an enterprise content strategy.
Employees are (and should be) hired for their knowledge and skill, not necessarily their multilingual skills. In a global organization with many offices worldwide, the result is a diverse team with content developers and contributors that speak many different languages. Collaborating on content development—especially on the same document—can be difficult if employees do not speak the same language fluently (or at all).
A misfire by a German grocery chain entering the US market reminds me of a very important content strategy commandment: Know thy audience.
00:00 Sarah O’Keefe: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way.
In episode 21 of this podcast, we wonder, is Google Translate good enough? Hi everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe. I am hosting this episode and I am here to talk with Bill Swallow. Hey Bill.
Bill Swallow discusses the possibilities and the limitations of machine translation tools such as Google Translate.
When is Google Translate good enough and when do you need professional (human) translation?
