The Guide to Translation and Localization: Single-source Content Management Systems

By Lingo Systems,
Portland, OR, U.S.A.

info [at] lingosys . com
www.lingosys.com

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Chapter 15: Single-source Content Management Systems

by Paul Trotter

More and more businesses are expanding into international markets. A critical success factor for this expansion is high-quality, cost-effective, and timely translated written content. Responsibility for this typically falls on internal translation departments or localization partners. Translation comes at a high price, exceeding the cost of writing the original content after only a few languages.

Paul Trotter AuthorIT Founder and CEO Paul is the founder and CEO of AuthorIT Software Corporation, the makers of AuthorIT. Paul is also the architect of AuthorIT, and has been involved with documentation for over twelve years.

Current approaches to localization rely on technologies and processes that have minimal scope for improvement. The localization industry is under increasing pressure to find new ways to improve cost-efficiency, quality, and time-to-market.

In this chapter we will try to explain what content management is and how it can help your organization more efficiently write higher quality and more effective documentation. We will also discuss how to re-use and share content across documents, have strict Control over standards and branding, publish content to print, help, and web formats, and reduce the cost of localizing your content.

What is Content Management?

So what is Content Management? The first thing to say is that there is no single agreed definition. Content management is a relatively new discipline, and if you ask the many suppliers of content management software they all have different definitions. Of course, most of them make the definition suit what their software does.

It is fair to say that most people regard content management as applying solely or mainly to the management and delivery of web content. This is a very limited view. Content management software covers a much wider area and can be categorized as follows:

Web Content Management - This was the first and is the most common use of the term "content management." These systems are primarily used to help manage websites and web content. In this context the word "content" refers to any resource used to build a website. Most of these applications are only concerned with managing the delivery of the website. The authoring and maintenance are done by other products.

Document/File Management - Document and file management systems are designed to manage whole documents and other files rather than the words and pictures inside them. They know little about what the files contain and treat them as just a "blob" of data. They rely heavily on users defining and applying metadata to give them more information. In practice, however, metadata is often not applied and the applications are little more than filing systems.

Digital Asset Management - Very similar in nature to document and file management systems, in that they manage files; but because they focus on multimedia there is little or no functionality for text intensive files. These applications are used mainly to create a central repository for graphics, video, flash, and other multimedia files, and provide archive, search, and retrieval functions.

Source Control - Again, similar to document and file management systems, but they are primarily concerned with managing source code, which are pure text files. They usually have poor support for dealing with binary content and often provide integration with software development environments.

Enterprise Content Management - This is one of the newest categories in content management and does not yet have a clear definition. Most providers in this space are actually combining many of the other categories and calling it "Enterprise" as it provides a wider scope.

Single-source Content Management - These systems provide the most benefits for localization. Rather than storing documents, they store and manage the content that is used to assemble those documents in small reuseable components. These components can be anything from a single word to many paragraphs, or other components like graphics or links.

Single-source Content Management is an overall process for originating, managing, and publishing content right across the enterprise and to any output.

Content management should be an end-to-end solution providing the ability to track, manage, and Control what happens to your content at all stages in the documentation cycle: from authoring and importing, to storage and document assembly, to multi-output publishing.

What is the difference between Managing Content and Managing Files?

The answer to this question is the key to why Single-source Content Management provides so many benefits over traditional file management systems.

The most important aspect to managing any kind of data is to Control how it is created and changed. This is the cornerstone of enterprise applications of all types and is the only way you can truly manage information. The next step is adding value to it.

The typical approach to document and file management is to move the files from the file system into a database where they are stored in exacdy the same format as they were created. These systems typically provide access Control, versioning, metadata tagging, and search capabilities. There is little Control, however, over the modification or creation of the files in the first place. Instead, they rely entirely on other applications to do that.

Let us look at this problem from a different perspective. Let us say your organization is using Excel spreadsheets to manage their financial accounts. At some point this approach becomes unmanageable for a variety of reasons. It is decided to move to a purpose-built accounting system that uses a backend database, allows multi-users, provides audit trails, has financial reporting, and is able to manage the underlying data.

Would you just move the Excel spreadsheets as they are into a file management system and expect it to magically create a profit and loss statement, or chart of accounts? Of course not, that would be impossible. Instead, you would move the data from the spreadsheets into the predefined relational database structure provided by the purpose-built accounting system. Now you would be able to get all of your reporting, ensure data was entered correcdy have multiple users editing without fear of overwrites, and exercise a much greater degree of security over your data.

Would you expect to be able to continue editing your accounts in Excel? Of course not - the information is no longer in Excel format, and doing so would bypass your controls and auditing. You would now edit the information in a controlled fashion in the accounting system. No longer would you get an unbalanced transaction or have information changed by unauthorized sources. Best of all, your reporting is a mouse click away.

Single-source Content Management provides the same evolutionary leap for content. It provides a more effective and more efficient way of authoring managing, publishing and localizing your organization's documents, images, web content, etc.

Why do You Need Content Management?

Content is an Asset

Generating content takes time and money - often lots of both. So content should be treated as the valuable asset that it is.

To get maximum value from your documentation resources, you should be able to do a number of things:

- Reuse content across documents without copying so that you can write it once and maintain it in a single place, no matter how many times you have used it,

- Use content created for one purpose equally well in other contexts and for other purposes,

- Translate reused content once and have it automatically reflected wherever it is used,

- Publish to print, help, and web outputs without having to modify or make different versions of your content, and

- Involve more people in the documentation process, such as subject matter experts, application developers, localization teams, and trainers.

These features have the potential for increasing the quality and consistency of your documentation, reducing the cost and time involved in producing it, and gaining more value from every piece of content that you create.

Control is Essential

Assets are of no use if you can't manage them. Having tons of content that you cannot find, organize, protect, or use effectively is simply a waste of time.

Involving more people is a good idea, but it requires serious organization. Wider access can be a disaster if the system can't cope.

To properly control your content, you must be able to:

- Set and enforce your standards to ensure consistency and quality

- Control who in the organization can create, see, and use content,

- Find the content components when you need them,

- Manage the content life cycle through drafts, reviews, localization, release, and archiving, and

- Control what can be published to each output channel and by whom.

What are the Savings and Benefits?

An Example of Cost Savings

Whether you choose to manage the translation in-house or to outsource it to an external vendor, localization can be a complicated and expensive process. On the first mention of localization the immediate reaction from your financial department may be to reach defensively for their wallets. Costs can be unpredictable and can quickly get out of Control, particularly if you don't know what to expect. Let us look at an example to put this in perspective:

The average cost a translator will charge is around 25 cents (U.S.) per word. Take a document with 500 pages and an average of 200 words per page. That's 100,000 words, so you are quickly looking at $25,000.

Now remember that is just for the initial translation. There will be more costs when you make modifications to the original document and need it retranslated. Most translation agencies use translation memory tools which help reduce the effort involved in retranslating a document, but they still charge for the whole document (albeit at a reduced word rate for the text already translated).

When using translation memory tools, a fuzzy match is returned when a text segment is similar but not identical. An exact match (100%) is returned when there is no difference or variation between the two segments. Translators often charge different rates for exact matches, fuzzy matches (with the match falling between a certain percentage), or new previously untranslated text.

Let us get back to our example. You now modify 15% of these pages, and add 20 new pages. Without allowing for fuzzy matches, the cost of retranslation can quickly approach $10,000:

Over time, these costs quickly mount up. Our example was just one document into one language. Translate that same document into 10 other languages, and multiply the cost 10 times. Translate a further 10 or 100 documents into multiple languages, and watch your costs skyrocket!

How Single-source Content Management Reduces Translation Costs:

Using a content management system that stores and manages content in XML format can facilitate localization. It can also yield significant savings.

1) You only translate objects that have been modified.

For example, let us go back to our 500 page document which we have now updated. Rather than sending the translator all 500 pages again, only the 20 new pages and the 5% of modified pages are exported as XML. Using our previous example this would reduce the cost of retranslation from $9,800 to $2,250!

2) Text is only translated once.

The same components are reused in multiple documents. For example, the same copyright notice (or even an entire introductory chapter) may be used over and over. Each component only requires translation once. You can even reuse content as small as a phrase, sentence, or paragraph which takes reuse even further, and again, only pay for translation once.

Cross references and hyperlinks do not even require translation. Because they are inserted at publishing time, taking their text from the heading of the component they reference, they are not stored in the text, resulting in less to translate. Likewise, reference text such as See and on Page is defined by templates, so only the template requires tanslation.

Our studies have shown an average 30% reduction in word count through reuse of content.

3) The XML files do not contain formatting.

When the same text string is found using different character formatting, memory translation tools do not always identify it as an exact match. Because the XML files in a content management tool do not contain formatting, this helps increase the exact matches found.

Benefits for Localization

When you manage your content at a more granular level there are a number of things you can do that cannot be done with whole documents. Some of the specific benefits to localization are:

Translate Content Once - The system knows what content is translatable, has been previously translated, is reused, or has been added or changed since the last translation. Only content that actually requires translation is sent to translators, which significantly reduces word count and cost of translation.

Faster Time to Market - Localization and content creation can ran in tandem, allowing translation to finish much sooner. Content is created in small discrete components that can immediately be sent for translation. This avoids the costly exercise of translating drafts or waiting for completion of the entire source content.

Automated Single-source Publishing - Once source content is translated and reviewed, it can be published directly to print, help, and web formats without tweaking or rework. This provides substantial savings, and eliminates inconsistencies in translation across delivery formats.

Cleaner Translation Memory - Translatable XML contains only text and semantic markup, increasing translation memory accuracy, and eliminating the effect of formatting on memory matches.

Improved Accountability - Only content that requires translation is sent for translation. Each piece of content has an accurate word count and is known by all parties in the process, avoiding any surprises or disputes.

Overall Benefits of Content Management

Single-source Content Management provides significant benefits and cost savings over traditional document authoring and maintenance methods. Some of these are:

Faster Time to Market - Because authors spend far less time creating and recreating the same content, reviewers spend less time reviewing and translators spend less time translating. Publishing to print, help, and web formats is fully automated. This is achieved by controlling standards, eliminating duplication, and effectively managing creation, localization, and publishing of content.

Efficient use Of Resources - By eliminating repetitive creation and maintenance, more of your resources can be devoted to improving the quality of the content and adding value to your documentation. Many clients report savings in excess of 20% through reuse of content.

Major Production Cost Savings - Efficient creation, maintenance, and management of content will naturally result in major cost savings. You achieve more documentation for less outlay and the time taken to produce a page through traditional authoring tools can be halved.

Lower Translation Costs - Content is translated only once no matter how often it is reused. Translators only ever work on new or changed source content, so you do not pay for them to handle unchanged text. Real projects have shown reductions in translation word count in excess of 30%.

Improved Quality and Usability of Content - Through enforcement of standards you can guarantee consistent documentation structure and formatting, increasing readability and usability. Using single-source content ensures 100% consistency wherever it appears.

Improved Workplace Satisfaction - Freeing authors from tedious, time-consuming tasks such as formatting and repetitive updates allows them to concentrate on creating and improving content. Reviewers gain by reviewing content only once, regardless of the number of end deliverables. Writers save 95% of the time they usually spend formatting content.

Increased Customer Satisfaction - Consistent, accurate documentation of all types means fewer calls to customer support because you are providing the right information, at the right time, in the right format.

About AllthorlT

AuthorIT Software Corporation, founded in 1996, is based in Auckland, New Zealand. AuthorIT is an integrated, end-to-end component content management solution, incorporating authoring, content management, workflow, security and standards control, localization management, website management, and publishing to print, PDF, online Help, web, and XML. The newly released AuthorIT Website Manager stores content separately from the design and function, then assembles and delivers the requested page dynamically, tailored for the individual visitor. AuthorIT Website Manager enables organizations to deliver websites that adjust to the visitor based on browser, language, and device. It also includes modules for project management, localization, web content management, and offline authoring. AuthorIT has thousands of customers in over 50 countries across 5 continents.

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