In 2000, Symantec, the global leader in security, storage and systems management solutions for business and consumer information, decided to reorganize its global communication and publishing strategy. With rapid global expansion and product localization in over 40 languages, the company was finding it difficult to maintain brand consistency across messages published in different geographies. The global marketing team therefore decided to centralize control over all publishing processes.
As a result, the product and document localization process was reinvented as a hub, around which internal customers and external suppliers such as LSPs would gather in various configurations created on a content and communication technology platform. Responsibility over this new localization hub was assigned to Symantec's Shared Engineering Services (SES) based in Dublin (IE). One outcome of this streamlining process was the decision to set up a small R&D group within Language Services to drive innovation in automating localization tasks, testing tools and technologies, and measuring each aspect of the process from inside the hub.
The alternative would have been to engage an LSP to do this work of remodeling the process. However, SES decided that none of the LSPs in the market was suited to such a major task. As it demanded both in-house moving and shaking, tough budget choices, and also placing taxing pricing demands on LSP partners themselves, this mission could only be managed effectively from inside Symantec.
The cost of this R&D strategy is considered "acceptable" by the SES team, which managed to attract a highly flexible population of students, whose PhD work has contributed to Symantec improvements in a win-win partnership deal. Overall, then, Symantec has grown its solution organically into what it claims to be one of the most complex localization implementations in the world, serving multiple streams of translation across the whole global company.
This report tells the story of how the SES managed to revamp the company's localization workflow, introduce a program of radical but carefully monitored automation, and set and achieve demanding productivity targets during the next eight years.
Full report exclusively available to TAUS members >> Symantec Report January 2009
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ARTICLES ON OTHER REPORTS IN 2009
LSPs in the MT Loop: Current Practices, Future Requirements (July)
ProMT: Machine Translation Solutions Tailored to All Types of User Environment (July)
TAUS Innovation Roadmap (June) - Complimentary report
Owning MT. Lionbridge and SDL as MT users (April)
Microsoft's Machine Translation (March)
Technical Guide to Statistical Machine Training Data (March)
