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- 1. © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
Doc. V.1.0
Best Practices in Web Globalization
A Lionbridge White Paper
September 12, 2005
- 2. Web Globalization Best Practices Page 2
A Lionbridge White Paper © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
Contents
Executive Summary...................................................................................... 3
Web Globalization — Typical Issues and Challenges..................................... 4
Strategy.................................................................................................... 4
Fragmentation — Same Company, Many Faces ............................................ 4
International Market Has the Greatest Growth Potential ................................ 4
Brands are Not Protected Globally.............................................................. 5
Localization Efforts are Fragmented............................................................ 5
User Experience........................................................................................ 5
Brand Not Applied Consistently Globally...................................................... 5
Use of Imagery and Color Internationally .................................................... 6
Are Your Global Users Second Class Citizens? .............................................. 6
Dealing with Text Expansion and Shrinkage................................................. 7
Content..................................................................................................... 7
Is Your Content Good for a Global Audience?............................................... 7
Global, Regional and Local Content are Mixed and Need to be Un-Entangled .... 8
Content Synchronization May Be an Issue Among Global Sites ....................... 8
Managing Global Content Will Require a Team Effort..................................... 8
Technology ............................................................................................... 9
Is Your Infrastructure Global Ready? .......................................................... 9
Code May Be an Issue.............................................................................. 9
Content Management is Key for Global Sites................................................ 9
Linking Content Creation and Localization is Needed and Possible..................10
Web Globalization — Best Practices ........................................................... 11
Strategy.................................................................................................. 11
Creating International Market Business Case ..............................................11
Formally Build International User Profiles and Scenarios...............................11
Define Key Globalization and Localization Metrics ........................................11
User Experience...................................................................................... 12
Define Global User Experience Strategy .....................................................12
Implement an Appropriate Language Selection Framework ...........................12
Implement an Appropriate Country Selection Process ..................................13
Create a Unified Global User Experience.....................................................13
Content................................................................................................... 13
Define Content Publishing Plan for Markets.................................................13
Define Content Taxonomy........................................................................14
Define the Content Production Process.......................................................14
Technology ............................................................................................. 15
Internationalize Key Components and Architecture ......................................15
Invest in a Good Multi-Lingual Search........................................................16
Deploy a Strong CMS to Enable Global Content Lifecycle ..............................16
Implement Automated Link between CMS and Content Localization ...............17
Conclusions................................................................................................ 19
Additional resources ............................................................................... 19
- 3. Web Globalization Best Practices Page 3
A Lionbridge White Paper © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
Executive Summary
Website globalization eliminates misunderstandings by adapting
information to meet a target locale's cultural, linguistic, and
business requirements. By translating your website, you enable
users to access information about your company quickly and
easily. By allowing your customers, partners, and employees to
communicate effectively with you in international markets, the
cost of doing business decreases while business results
increase. But, creating a global presence for your website often
requires extraordinary efforts to keep your brand strong.
Four components work together to form the foundation of the
worldwide web — Strategy, User Experience, Content, and
Technology. While this framework is well established within
the United States, globally it is still in its adolescence. Most
companies with global markets have developed solutions that
serve those markets, but the level of support varies greatly.
After a Web site launch from headquarters, for example, there
are often significant reverberations within the local country
offices as users struggle with things like inconsistent branding,
fragmented localization, and inappropriate content.
This white paper presents the Lionbridge view on Web
globalization and describes what we believe to be an effective
approach to mastering it. We believe that to create and sustain
a strong global Web solution, an organization must address
each of the four “Web pillars.”
- 4. Web Globalization Best Practices Page 4
A Lionbridge White Paper © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
Web Globalization — Typical Issues and Challenges
The following represents key issues that clients who take their
online solutions global typically experience.
Strategy
Fragmentation — Same Company, Many Faces
Seen and unseen “demarcation lines” between the spheres of
influence within a company impact the globalization effort.
Geography plays a key role in these spheres of influence, and
the distribution of responsibility and resources across global
markets can be extremely uneven. The corporate office
typically drives the Web initiative, but may lack the budget and
the reach to effectively position the company on the Web
across all markets. Consequently the in-country offices that are
close to the customer and own the revenue in the markets
often need to create a local online presence — typically by
adapting the corporate content, look-and-feel and functionality.
It also sends the overall message to the prospect and customer
base that they are dealing with multiple companies online as
opposed to one global company.
International Market Has the Greatest Growth Potential
The international markets are growing at the fastest rates. For
most companies, a big opportunity lies in growing revenues
internationally.
Source: Global Reach
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A Lionbridge White Paper © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
Brands are Not Protected Globally
It is typical for most companies to suffer from one of two
“globalization brand syndromes.”
• Corporate site, translated — just a pure translation done
with little input from the local offices. The message is
unfocused, and not specific to the country, with no
means for the local office to address the site unless they
build something of their own.
• Runaway brand — which results when local offices solve
the need of supporting their prospect and customer base
by creating their own versions of the site. In extreme
cases, the local site shares only a logo with the
corporate site and presents the company completely
differently than the main Web site.
Projecting a globally viable, coherent brand on the Web is not a
trivial proposition and requires much coordination, planning,
structure, and resources.
Localization Efforts are Fragmented
Companies that lack a planned approach to localization often
get the content ready for global users in a stove-pipe fashion,
with multiple entities (departments, countries, individuals)
involved. This complexity belies the real cost of localization,
since it is buried in so many budgets and does not allow for a
high-quality approach with economies of scale, reuse, and
standardization.
User Experience
When looking at user experience, two components are
addressed: visual (color scheme, imagery, icons) and
information/interactive architecture (navigation, integration).
Both of these impact and are impacted by Web globalization.
Brand Not Applied Consistently Globally
The “look-and-feel” aspect of sites is what gives the first
(visceral) impression to a global user. Many companies do not
have global brand guidelines for the Web. The “global branding”
planning is a foundation for supporting the global brand
through user experience, which should address color scheme,
imagery, editorial tone, and fonts.
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A Lionbridge White Paper © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
Use of Imagery and Color Internationally
There are a few aspects to getting the imagery and color “right”
globally. Let’s remember that we are dealing with people and
their senses, and people in different countries can have vastly
different cultural norms.
The following table illustrates the meanings attached to
something as simple as color in different countries.
Color China Japan Egypt France United States
Red Happiness Anger, Danger Death Aristocracy Danger, Stop
Blue Heavens, Clouds Villainy Virtue, Faith,
Truth
Freedom, Peace Masculine,
Corporate
Green Ming Dynasty,
Heavens
Future, Youth,
Energy
Fertility, Strength Criminality Safety, Go
Yellow Birth, Wealth,
Power
Grace, Nobility Happiness,
Prosperity
Temporary Cowardice,
Temporary
White Death, Purity Death Joy Neutrality Purity
No color is inherently “safe” or “good” and therefore a design
needs to consider the color scheme in context.
The same must be said about imagery. Companies must pay
attention to cultural sensitivities — for example using people of
the right ethnicity. People’s gender, dress and gestures — none
must offend the cultural norms. Iconography is a subset of
imagery and, since it typically aids the navigation, it needs to
be global-friendly.
Most companies are careful when using stock photography and
either go for a “global look” or allow local offices to create
locale-specific images. Some rely on their distributors and
partners to take care of the Web efforts for a particular market.
Are Your Global Users Second Class Citizens?
A not so infrequent scenario we see with customers is that the
look-and-feel (especially the “feel” — what they can DO with
the site) is best and most consistent for the main site users
(e.g., U.S. users for a U.S. headquartered multinational
company), with global users being second-class citizens. A
number of issues make a site globally unfriendly.
One problem is hidden country and language selectors due to
poor placement on the page. It is absolutely paramount for a
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A Lionbridge White Paper © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
foreign user to find this feature, yet so many sites provide
language selectors that are half-hidden, or below the “fold” of
the page.
Another issue is lack of language consistency. Once a user
selects a language, he or she expects the entire experience to
be in that language. But often he is presented with a mix of
local and U.S. content, which leads to a fragmented experience.
Not all functionality (or content) is available in all target
languages.
The switch between the local and the corporation’s national
language is not something to be taken lightly and must be
analyzed for impact on the user. Does the user speak the
corporate language? Will he or she feel comfortable finishing
the transaction in the nonnative language? Does the Web site
support the local currency?
Dealing with Text Expansion and Shrinkage
A phenomenon called “text expansion” takes place when a
piece of text is translated from English to most European
languages. On average, an English sentence, when translated,
can be 30-40% larger in a foreign language (actually could be
as much as 200% for a particular word). For Asian languages,
the opposite effect takes place, and the text may shrink 30-
50%.
That can directly and negatively impact the user interface, if
care is not taken to allow for “elastic” scaling of the menu items
containing text, icon names and the like. This issue plagues a
lot of companies’ Web sites, but can be avoided by defining the
global requirements and standards early on with the user
experience team.
Content
Is Your Content Good for a Global Audience?
When reviewing companies’ content we find that it often is
written with one audience in mind — a corporate single-market
one. It suffers from not being written for a global audience:
• Not written with a “translator” in mind
• Use of culture-specific examples (e.g., referring to ATMs
or the NHL in the U.S.) or references (holidays, seasons)
• No terminology standardization, which leads to
multiplicity in translation, contributing to higher costs
and greater confusion
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A Lionbridge White Paper © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
Global, Regional and Local Content are Mixed and Need
to be Un-Entangled
Companies do not formally separate different levels of content
scope.
We define content scope as an area (geographical or business)
to which this particular content applies. The typical areas of
scope are:
• Corporate — content that applies to the company as a
whole in all regions
• Regional — content that is specific to a region (for
example, North America, Europe, Asia)
• Local — content specific to a particular country (France,
Japan, United States, etc.)
By formally identifying the scope, a company can begin to
develop a global content model. The content scope will govern
the processes around global content creation and management
— for authoring, reviewing, approvals, as well as costs and
scope for localization.
Content Synchronization May Be an Issue Among Global
Sites
Timeliness of updates can be important if they relate to
simultaneous shipment of product, are related to key corporate
announcements, or have legal or compliance implications.
We have observed that companies have a hard time keeping
content in sync across their global markets. Synchronization
refers to the requirement of having global content updated at
the same time (or nearly the same time). Typically, a
relationship between source content and localized content
should be identified to ensure synchronization requirements.
Managing Global Content Will Require a Team Effort
Typically, most content is owned by the marketing department,
with the content management process having three steps:
• Creation/content development — content is created or
updated
• Review — multiple levels of review, depending on the
type of content change (may include marketing, sales
and legal)
• Approval and publishing — once the content is
approved, it is published to a live site
In the global scenario, with content modeling being done at a
finer (corporate, regional, local) level of granularity, the steps
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A Lionbridge White Paper © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
of Create->Review->Approve may need to become more
tailored to the specifics of the content update, with processes
becoming “chained” — where a change in one area may trigger
other changes (as in the case of translated content). Ultimately,
it means that from the content production and update
perspective, each of the team members on the extended
“content team” — whether it’s marketing or technology —
needs to be aware of the impact of global content on their area.
Technology
Is Your Infrastructure Global Ready?
The first hurdle that companies moving toward a global Web
solution need to clear is getting the infrastructure
internationalized. Internationalization (or “i18n” — because
there are 18 letters between “I” and “n” in internationalization)
has two goals:
• Ensure that the product (solution, site, etc.) is functional
and accepted in international markets
• Ensure that the product (solution, site, etc.) is
localizable
If the necessary steps to get your infrastructure
internationalized are not taken, the Web solution can be subject
to delays, rework, and painful extra-work to localize the
solution at the proverbial “eleventh hour” of the project.
Code May Be an Issue — Must Look under the Hood
While the specific components of standard development tools
and languages (Java, .NET) for the most part provide
capabilities to facilitate working with global content, specific
code samples and programming tactics have not been
reviewed. This is important because the availability of global
functionality does not guarantee successful internationalization.
To ensure this requires implementing global functionality in
accordance with general and framework-specific best practices,
coupled with a clear, logical global strategy that addresses a
specific international business case.
Content Management is Key for Global Sites
Most companies either have or are migrating to a content
management system (CMS), whether it’s home-grown or a
third-party software package.
Content management is a key process in maintaining and
evolving the site. A CMS is a foundation for a site where global
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A Lionbridge White Paper © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
content is created, managed, and delivered. If you have issues
with the current content management process today, they will
grow exponentially in the global scenario, due to a greater
number of content modules, with more relationships between
them, managed by more people in more languages, more
often.
Linking Content Creation and Localization is Needed and
Possible
Given the dynamic, fast-changing nature of most sites in
today’s business climate, the link between content creation and
content localization processes must be as friction-free as
possible. Lionbridge typically sees these four models of linking
content management and localization processes:
• Translation within a CMS: This method is best for
environments with third-party content management
systems, where translation is done in house, with no
reliance on best practices such as translation memory or
terminology management.
• Manual exchange of files: This is the most widely used
method for exchanging assets with a localization vendor,
where an FTP or an email is used. It is best for larger,
less frequent updates, given the overhead, and the need
for manual process.
• Use of Globalization Management System: There are
third party systems that allow companies to manage the
full localization life-cycle. These are very costly systems
that are best for companies that want to make
translation management their core competency.
• Direct CMS/Localization Link: By relying on emerging
standards in the localization industry (XML, Web
Services), programmatically set up a frictionless content
exchange, automatically sending assets for localization,
receiving localized assets and importing them into a
CMS. This approach works for any company that is
interested in connecting their content repository
(whether third party or homegrown) directly with their
vendors’ localization infrastructure, maximally
leveraging their investment in a CMS.
When selecting the appropriate approach, a number of factors
come into play, like the type of CMS involved, rate of change of
content, budget, workflow desired, and overall localization
strategy.
- 11. Web Globalization Best Practices Page 11
A Lionbridge White Paper © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
Web Globalization — Best Practices
The following represents key best practices Lionbridge has
developed and observed when working with companies that
globalize and evolve their online solutions.
Strategy
Creating International Market Business Case
Create a Market Entry Checklist and Kit — Once a market has
been identified, create a checklist and market “kit” for how that
market will be handled from an online perspective. This kit
would include:
• Required content
• Online standards
• Rules of engagement
Define Support and Resource Plan — Critical to market entry is
identifying the resource plan to handle the various tasks
associated with entering a market. These tasks may include:
• Management of the globalization/localization process
• Review cycles of translations
• Global customer sales
• Global customer support
Formally Build International User Profiles and Scenarios
In line with building knowledge of international users,
Lionbridge recommends formally profiling international users
and defining applicable use cases. Cultural biases and
expectations should be examined in user profiling to better
understand needs and expectations.
Define Key Globalization and Localization Metrics
Companies must establish success metrics for both
globalization and localization.
Tracking these will allow you to evolve and correct these
practices as needed. Sample globalization metrics are as
follows and can be used as a starting point:
• Number of visitors per international sites
• Number of page views
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A Lionbridge White Paper © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
• New users to online sales
Localization metrics include:
• Cost
• Number of words
• Number of errors
• Translation memory leverage percentage
• Translation memory savings percentage
User Experience
Define Global User Experience Strategy
Companies must define their global online strategy as an
extension of their overall marketing and sales strategy. It is
important to methodically define and control the key elements
such as brand, content, look-and-feel, and control.
Define unified user experience components for online sites —
Defining a unified experience may incorporate things related to
content, navigation, look-and-feel, or functionality. Standards
should be defined for each of these areas. A single standard
does not have to exist, but maintenance of some standards will
drive consistency and brand.
Publish a brand and style guide — Companies should consider
the creation and implementation of an online style guide that
will define areas such as imagery, logos, tone, content, and
colors with regards to its online assets. While potentially a large
undertaking, the importance of this is heightened, especially if
multiple web teams (inside the company and partners) are
involved.
If the outside partners (such as distributors) are involved,
Lionbridge recommends bringing them into this process as well.
Having them provide in-country information and perspective
can be very useful and provide cost savings in this process.
Implement an Appropriate Language Selection
Framework
Language selection is a particularly important part of the
navigation framework. The user’s preferred language may drive
content, functionality, and other online features.
While there are a number of adequate ways to address
language selection, the following are often considered best
practice guidelines when establishing language selection:
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• Allow users to select their preferred language
• Provide list of locales and languages in users’ language
• Provide a simple user friendly mechanism from the
home page
Implement an Appropriate Country Selection Process
It is important to consider the ramifications of a user selecting
a country. The selection of a country may be coupled or
decoupled from the language selection process depending on
the business rules on the back end. Country selection may
drive functionality and content as well.
Create a Unified Global User Experience
It is important to work toward a unified experience between
multiple global Web sites.
Unified does not mean “the same” — everything is done in
context, and in accordance to your global brand strategy. What
is critical is to define the “global space” for users and to stick to
it. Shifting between localized and non-localized content and
functionality can be both jarring and considered poor from a
user experience perspective. One of the key tenets of Web site
localization is to honor the user’s selection of locale by
providing him a coherent and self-contained experience in the
locale (or language) of his choice. Expressed another way —
“Once they chose a language or country, keep them there.”
Content
Define Content Publishing Plan for Markets
Once the key markets have been selected and tiered,
companies must create a content publishing plan for each. This
publishing plan will dictate what content gets published, where
and how. The content localization plan should be based on
market requirements and expectations. Ideally each target
locale should be assessed to validate market needs and
constraints. Additionally, competitive position should be taken
into consideration, i.e., if your competitor is providing a fully
localized Web site, then it may be in your interest to provide
this as well.
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A Lionbridge White Paper © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
Lionbridge Best Practice: Define “global space”
for international users and stick to it as
much as possible. Warn in language when
linking to content that is in a different
language.
An effective content publishing plan should have the following
two items accounted for:
• Determine what will be published and where. This is a
function of business goals and local marketing plans and
strategies; e.g., what products/services are offered in
specific markets.
• Determine what will be localized. This is a function of
the estimation of the value of translation and/or
adaptation of the content for those specific markets.
Define Content Taxonomy
Global content needs to be classified to define the relevant
dimensions of content to be published for all locales.
Formalizing these classifications in a content taxonomy can be
increasingly useful as you go global. This taxonomy will define
the existing “buckets” of content and their respective key
characteristics related to source, authoring, production, and
localization. The typical “buckets” are the global, regional, local,
and targeted content.
Define the Content Production Process
The next step is to define the applicable production processes
and plans for the content.
Essentially, once you have identified and classified the “what,”
you need to identify the “who,” “how,” and “by when/how
often” issues. Creation of both the content taxonomy and
production process are the precursors to the implementation
and deployment of a content management system.
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A Lionbridge White Paper © 2005 Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
Technology
Internationalize Key Components and Architecture
The following is a list of typical Web internationalization best
practices — the specifics will vary depending on the technology
set in use (i.e., .NET, Java, ASP, etc.)
Standardize on Unicode — Standardizing on Unicode will allow
multilingual content to be stored in a common repository
without the need to track encodings with each entry. It also
allows for multilingual content display in cases where this is
desirable (for example, when you have a page that lists
available languages, each name in its own language.
Implement a local detection/selection system — An
international site with localized content should implement a
system to determine the appropriate locale for the visitor
through a combination of detection and user selection.
Such a system might work like this:
1. Check for a cookie containing locale information
2. If a cookie is not present or does not contain locale
information, detect locale from the browser
3. Redirect to a page where the user can confirm the
determined locale or select a different locale
4. Save the selected locale information in a cookie
Use appropriate data types for content fields that can contain
foreign language in the database — There are two primary
types of content that can contain foreign (extended)
characters: foreign content and translatable content. Foreign
content is content that can contain extended characters but is
not typically translated; for example, a Japanese user’s name.
Translatable content is content that can be translated and will
have separate entries for each supported language. This
differentiation is important because there are typically different
storage requirements in terms of database architecture, but
also because the need to support Unicode-encoded foreign
content is sometimes overlooked, whereas translatable content
is not.
Use locale-specific stylesheets for styles that include font
definitions — Font definitions, including size, family/face, and
format (bold/italic/oblique), are locale-sensitive.
For example, smaller font sizes can be harder to read for Asian
languages, and some Asian languages use formatting such as
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bold and italic very sparingly or not at all. Therefore, it is
considered a best practice to define styles on a per-locale basis,
which makes it possible to have different font sizes and turn
bold or italic on or off depending on the locale. The style sheet
determination mechanism could also fall back to a default style
sheet in cases where a style sheet for a specific locale does not
exist.
Determine browser support requirement — Microsoft Internet
Explorer is often considered “the” browser to support, which
reflects the fact that a majority of users use this browser by
default. However, some support for other browsers should be
considered. The Mozilla browser family, particularly Firefox, has
gained in popularity, and the Opera browser has a larger user
base in Europe than in the U.S.
Invest in a Good Multi-Lingual Search
You need to ensure your site search supports the locales and
the content necessary.
There are number of good search packages on the market, and
finding out how well your search engine supports multilingual
searches is important as you embark on the Web globalization
journey.
Deploy a Strong Content Management System to Enable
Global Content Lifecycle
Companies considering global Web solutions for sites with
reasonably fast-changing content must evolve their home-
grown system, or invest in a third-party CMS to support the
needs of global content creation and publishing. Many factors
go into selection of a CMS (there are number of good resources
on the Internet), but here are a few factors to consider:
• Creating Content Ownership Areas: Users “own”
different parts of content, and it needs to be embodied
in the system, to support content creation workflow.
• Workflow: Setting up customized workflows, and
keeping track of where the documents are is critical to
ensuring that the right content will get published in the
right place at the right time. From a globalization point
of view, having a formal way of determining document
readiness for translation into another language as well
as Export/Import capabilities are very important to
minimize overhead in managing of translations, and to
improve the time it takes for global content to be
created.
• Content Granularity and Templating: Allowing for
modeling your site in terms of content modules, rather
than pages, is going to be an important capability to
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maintain and “institutionalize” through technology. Also,
using content templates will allow content contributors
to manage their content in a more user-friendly,
controlled way.
• Content Reuse: Similar to the previous item, by
“chunking” content, you can create powerful reuse
models, with components needing to be created once,
and used in multiple ways. This can help streamline
content creation and the localization process.
Implement Automated Link between Content
Management and Content Localization
Creating multi-lingual Web sites is hard enough, but
maintaining all the content across languages in sync is much
harder. Companies must establish a “frictionless content
exchange” process, where content update and content
localization are seamlessly integrated, and no unnecessary
cycles are wasted on manual processes. To achieve that, an
automated link can be established between your CMS and your
localization infrastructure, using the localization industry
standards of Translation Web Services and XLIFF.
Which content to send through automated link for translation —
All content can be sent through the automated link, but certain
content modules lend themselves more naturally to that
process than others. For example, the logo, icons, and imagery
are not likely to change too often, and can be sent for
localization in a manual mode (using FTP, or a portal) as part of
bulk localization. On the other hand, product descriptions,
services descriptions, e-learning materials, and marketing
campaigns change more often, and may require a quick
turnaround. These are natural candidates to be put on a “fast
track” through an automated link.
Lionbridge Translation Web Service — Lionbridge is proud to be
the first vendor in the localization industry who implemented a
full Web Services server to allow third parties to integrate
translation into their content repositories automatically.
Lionbridge Best Practice: A strong Content
Management System is a foundation of your
global web site. It will ultimately determine
the ease, and in some cases, the very
possibility of creating certain global content
models. It will also directly impact
efficiency and effectiveness of your content
contributors and time to market for your
content globally.
The basis of the Lionbridge Translation Web Services is a SOAP
server that interprets and services requests to the set of
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functions described in the WSDL file. This is done using SOAP
calls over HTTP. The functionality exposed by Web Services
allows for a full lifecycle of submission, monitoring and
retrieving of translation jobs and quotes, along with house-
keeping calls of getting a list of languages, users, etc. The
functions of translation Web Services include:
• Send content for translation
• Monitor job status
• Get translated content
• Get quotes
• Get list of available source/target languages
• Get list of users
With this set of functions, translation services can be
seamlessly integrated with any repository, workflow,
application, or process. This set can be scaled to whatever
solution is required to meet project needs.
Lionbridge Translation Web Services supports the XLIFF format
that has gained wide acceptance in the industry. XLIFF stands
for XML Localization Interchange File Format and is developed
under the auspices of OASIS. XLIFF usage allows for a safer
and potentially more efficient translation process. The
independence of tools is another invaluable advantage of using
XLIFF. Any type of content can be embedded into it. XLIFF data
is embedded in a SOAP envelope that is exchanged between
the repository and the Web Services.
A technical white paper on Lionbridge Translation Web Services
is available upon request.
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Conclusions
Ultimately, a successful Web globalization project is built on a
comprehensive strategy that fuses globalization best practices
with your specific branding and technology needs. The
“governance” element is also critical, as the issues of ownership
and control (of budgets, content, and technology) can manifest
into a tug-of-war between corporate and in-country influences,
and will come back to haunt you if not dealt with early in the
process.
Creating an inclusive, open process, and bringing the right
parties — marketing, business, technology and in-country
representatives — to the table is paramount to the success of
your Web globalization effort. Getting buy-in from the
stakeholders early will pave the way to success.
Lionbridge Best Practice: Implement an
automated link between content
management and content localization.
Establish a “frictionless content exchange”
process, where content update and content
localization are seamlessly integrated, and
no unnecessary cycles are wasted on
manual processes.
Finally, to be successful at Web globalization, one must have
the resources, support of the executive management, a budget,
and a plan. A good place to start is to define a Web
globalization strategy. We hope this paper has given you a
glimpse of the issues, challenges, and best practices to start
formulating your own Web globalization strategy.
Lionbridge would welcome the opportunity to explore the value
our enterprise-class solutions can bring to your organization
and would invite you to contact us for an initial discussion
about your global objectives and how we might be able to help
you achieve them.
Additional resources
To learn more about Lionbridge Web Globalization Best
Practices, please visit Lionbridge at: www.lionbridge.com.
Download additional white papers at the Lionbridge Knowledge
Center: www.lionbridge.com/kc.
To speak with a Lionbridge specialist, call +1-781-434-6111 or
email info@lionbridge.com.