TAUS - Enabling better translation

Sustainable growth series

You are the new CEO of one of the longest standing Fortune 500 companies. You had never dreamed of having this job. But for two weeks now you’ve been in charge. You had all the right cards to come in as a relative outsider and try and reinvent the company. 

Not that your company is on the rocks. But you are the third CEO in five years. The company is cash rich and revenues are still growing. But it’s now an also-ran and shareholders are jittery. You don’t stand out. No problem. You have a plan – focus on the products that work, spin-off the rest. Make sure customers are at the core. You have an experienced team behind you.

Sleepless over Globalization

Then something happens. Your wife, a partner at one of the world’s largest consultancy firms, tells you she needs to travel suddenly. A large multi-year opportunity, something really quite new - the client wants language translation to be embedded across the organization. Why? Because the CEO wants to be sure his company can always communicate with all its customers worldwide.

Coincidentally you are reading The Last Lingua Franca by Nicholas Ostler – an analysis of why English will be the last lingua franca. Your mind begins to turn. More than half of your company’s sales come from non-English markets….. Time to know more about your language strategy.

Back at HQ you call in your CMO and CTO who in turn call in their VPs. By the end of the day it is clear there is no language strategy as such. Translation is a cost of doing business. Everyone is confident that document production is efficient. You wonder who reads documents these days. Customer listening and engagement activity their taking place. But you don’t see that they are being connected with globalization activity.

The underlying processes are too manual. There’s no real cohesion between the disparate functions involved. You are not set up to listen and respond quickly enough to customer preferences across the globe. People are talking about your products, but you are not being active enough to influence their decision-making process. There’s no long-term plan to make improvements.

There is a big, undeclared problem. You call your old buddies at a strategic advisory firm you yourself have worked for in the past, and arrange a meeting for the following day.

Eight Things to Change
You start off by explaining your concern that your company does not seem fit for the 21st century’s communication challenges.

Even a tenfold increase in the budget would not mean that you could deliver translations fast enough into all markets. It’s clear that the very basic questions of whether the company is translating enough content, or the right content, in the right languages and at the right time, need to be addressed systematically and continuously.

You discuss with your advisors how McKinsey’s articulation of the Consumer Decision Journey is relevant to the multilingual communications challenges facing your company. This draws attention to the fact that active “pull” communication by consumers from manufacturer and marketer sources becomes dramatically more important than the traditional “push” channel from manufacturers and marketers towards consumers.

Companies must learn to succeed with this other-way communication process and influence user-driven touch points such as word-of-mouth and internet information sites.
The content you “own”, the translations you pay for, is under increasing competitive pressure from “earned” content, the content about your products generated, then shared and often more trusted by users.

Your consultants interview your key staff, analyze processes and investigate ways for your company to implement an effective 21st century language strategy.
Three weeks later, they present their initial findings. The first slide summarizes the full picture: “Eight things to change” to switch from 20th century translation to a 21st century enterprise language strategy.

Here is how they summarize their findings.
1. User-driven
While static publisher-driven content is naturally still part of the documentation and localization team’s responsibilities, it is crucial that processes and organization are adapted to ensure that the potentially unlimited stream of dynamic content is managed properly. This user-driven content simply cannot be translated in traditional ways. Advanced language and translation technologies are indispensable, and must be seamlessly integrated into the various content and social media platforms. This fundamental shift from publisher- to user-driven is a major technological and organizational challenge.

2. Long tail of languages
Thirty, forty or fifty languages may no longer be enough for your markets. As users take control of the communications process, it is hard to predict which languages will be needed at any given time.
As a global company you may very well have to facilitate cross-lingual communications in a long tail of 100 to 150 languages. The only way to do this effectively is to deploy automated translation technology. You would be hard put to find enough human translators trained in your products – or even enthusiastic communities of users - to cover all the languages you increasingly need.

3. Multidirectional
The situation becomes even more complex when we realize that English is losing its status as the lingua franca. Historically, more than ninety-five percent of your translations have been from English into thirty to forty important languages. The democratization of globalization and the shift to user-driven content mean that we must ‘listen’ more to the voice of the customer, rather than blindly pushing out content. This entails learning how to translate from a hundred-plus languages into English and also between many of these languages.

4. Unlimited content
As you already pointed out in your briefing to the advisors, dynamic user-generated content is becoming increasingly important in your customer communications. And more and more of it contains voice and video. Managing and facilitating the translation of all this “earned” and “shared” content – in addition to the “owned” content – has already become part of your company’s global communications responsibility.

5. Continuous translation
The documentation and localization team is used to working with a project-based agenda: counting words, setting up vendors, sending out PO’s, etcetera. The shift from static to dynamic content however makes it hard to maintain this approach to translation. New content comes in chunks and bits and requires continuous attention. Business and translation models need to adapt to this new reality. One outcome is that a word-based pricing model may no longer be relevant.

6. Collaborative translation
Innovation in your translation business is constrained by a cascaded supply chain. Every job and the many instructions that come along with it travel up and down a multi-layer supply chain. In a continuous translation cycle this complex hierarchical structure is simply not sustainable. Your company needs to cut out duplication and operational complexity.

The resulting self-organizing, collaborative community may even involve your own users and customers. Organizationally this is the hardest change for you, as it impacts the deeply-embedded working structures and habits of all your staff. Yet a paradigm shift is the underlying condition for true innovation; it will open the way to implementing a compelling enterprise language strategy.

7. Dynamic quality
Your company works with a static definition of quality: one translation quality fits all purposes and all content profiles. Quality is when the customer is satisfied. A one-size fits all approach does not take into account customer satisfaction. Highly tailored translations are needed to target users in specific niche groups.

Many other users prioritize timeliness rather than correcting minor linguistic errors. This is evidenced by the enormous popularity of real-time automated translation on the internet. Perhaps 80% of your total translation volume could be produced by well-trained, customized machine translation engines that deliver good enough translation.

For an enterprise-wide language strategy you need to stop managing translation as a stand-alone process and start treating it as a utility embedded in every web site, service and application. This change requires the effective use of collaborative and automated translation technologies.

8. Data is core
The translation industry is proud of its success in deploying translation memory technology. In a static “owned” content environment, translation memory technology helped recycle high percentages of previously translated sentences. However, as we shift to translating dynamic content in more language pairs, we quickly reach the limits of what translation memory technology can cope with. Collaborative and automated translation technologies need language or translation data in vast amounts, a paradigm shift compared to the traditional ways of managing translation memories.

Big data – big language data – and the management of it are fundamental to enabling collaborative, automated and responsive translation communications strategy.

Of the eight changes, this may be the biggest challenge both in terms of mindset for a traditionally craftsmanship-driven industry and in terms of achieving return-on-investment.

The consultancy concluded by saying that the full implementation of a 21st century enterprise language strategy would be a key foundation block for global competitiveness. This would truly enable you to embed a marketing strategy across your company. This would inspire and guide your product development teams. This would help you to stand out.

Your consultants say that they have taken their input on the “Eight Things to Change” from TAUS, the translation industry think tank that is organizing a summit on this very same topic in Paris this spring.

You immediately decide to create a task force that will prepare to implement a new, enterprise-wide language strategy. And you tell the task force to attend the TAUS European Summit in Paris.

Authors Jaap van der Meer, Rahzeb Choudhury and Andrew Joscelyne.