Global websites provide the local face of a global company. Customers who expect accessible product support have a frustrating experience when they have to deal with website which is not in the native language and even more annoying if the support contact number is of a different country. That is why in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) model, language and linguistics playing a major role in their training process.

1. Building Global Sites and Translation workflow with a WCM
perspective
Global websites provide the local face of a global company. Customers who expect
accessible product support have a frustrating experience when they have to deal with
website which is not in the native language and even more annoying if the support
contact number is of a different country. That is why in the Business Process
Outsourcing (BPO) model, language and linguistics playing a major role in their training
process.
It is natural human tendency for people to speak their own language and it is quite
obvious they want to do business in the same language as well. Most customers even if
they are comfortable with English would prefer to buy in their own language.
A look on how a user can navigate to a global website:
Users can navigate to the global site by an icon or some sort of a navigation bar. For
example on http://www.cisco.com the worldwide sites is located at the top menu bar,
on clicking it the user can narrow down the selection on the regions.
On http://www.nokia.com, the locator is at the bottom of the home page.

2. Why we need to build global sites?
i. Makes Economic Sense –
GDP of China and India are growing at more than 8% annually, and the entire world is
looking at the growing economies to bring the world out of the current recession. The
demand of the goods and services will rise and no company would want to miss the bus.
ii. Cultural – Send the correct message to the correct audience.
iii. Build the brand in the local market – GLOCAL concept – “Think Globally Act Locally”.
Each market will have different sales and marketing campaigns and the global website
should be able to support it independently.
iv. Provide a better and a timely support service to the customers.
v. Better rankings and appropriate search results in public search engines and
enterprise search engines.
vi. Ability to monitor and respond to update any stale or incorrect translations in
minimum possible time.
Strategy for building global sites and localizing/translating content:
1. Define the site area or sub-domains which will be the local home. Sub domain
example like: mail.cs.example.edu or www.cs.example.edu., or the ISO standards
http://www.example.com/<langugecode> /… Language code can be CN(Chinese), IN
(India) etc
2. Define the encoding standard – Unicode is the industry standard, some websites
have different encodings for different languages ISO-88591 (English chars, French),
Shift_JIS (Japanese)
3. Deciding the content strategy:
a. Reuse existing original language content and localize
i. Machine Translate – Use a machine or software which will do the translation
to a chosen language. Some of the vendors are Systran, babelfish(yahoo),
Google.
• MT makes sense if there are budget constraints. It is an advisable practice
that the MT output should be proof read first. Instead also provide an
option on the website for the visitors so that they can provide their
ratings, confirm if it meets expectations.
• To save cost when local language content is required but the expense of
human translation is prohibitive.
• • To save time when local language content is required but the delay for
human translation is unworkable.
• • To improve customer service when human translation cannot meet the
demands of content volume or rate of change.

3. ii. Human Translation – The services of a Translation Agency can be employed.
As per the defined business process, a document can be sent for translation
and the Agency can charge accordingly either per word or per pages.
Web Content Management and multilingual web sites
Effective solutions required correct implementation of a good strategy. Adhoc strategies
result in process inefficiencies making it very costly to make changes and time to market
is lost to the next competitor.
• Enterprise Web content management in conjunction with ECM suite of products
support multilingual websites. WCM solution enables authoring, managing,
versioning and publishing of Web content—all in multiple languages.
Technology helps to deliver a truly interactive online experience the visitors and
customers.
• EMC Documentum Web Publisher allows globalization and fallback rules. This
requires separate publishing configuration for each language, which may
become difficult to manage as languages grow.
• Standards surrounding localization (XLIFF) for exchanging translatable data. XLIFF
stands for XML Localization Interchange File Format.
• Translation workflows - These are simple process workflows with special tasks
used to translate a document. Translation workflows enable translators to be
assigned a task and access content via the Web to conduct translations.
Simultaneously, site managers can monitor the real-time state of projects. Each
language can have separate workflow and approvals. The integration points can
be integrated via Web Services, REST or CMIS.

4. Sample Business Process for Global Content Translation Workflow
Actors:
Content Management System and Publishing System (CMS)
Local Country Stakeholders
Marketing Project Manager (aka PM)
Marketing Developer (aka Developer)
Translation Agency (aka Agency)
Translation Workflow (aka TW)
Translation Workflow Engineer (aka Engineer)
Basic Flow:
1. Get latest version of the published content from CMS
2. Developer imports the content in TW.
3. PM access TW
i. Analyses the content (if required)
ii. Selects translation Agency in TW and initiate
4. TW begins translation job
i. TW analyzes and provides a PO quote for the task to the PM
5. PM confirms or denies PO confirmation
6. On confirmation Engineer submits content to TW
7. Agency access TW
i. Agency access TW gets the content
ii. Agency translate content
8. Agency emails Translation PM of translated content
9. PM emails respective Local Country Stakeholder with translated HTML (English
and Specific Language)
10. Local Country Stakeholders review the translated content
11. Stakeholder/Country Site owner emails PM with approval of translated content,
If denied, the job is sent back to TW for further analysis.
12. PM emails Developer to publish translated content.
13. Translation job is closed in TW.
14. Developer, using CMS creates correct references, tags to correct metadata and
publishes content via CMS to the site.
15. Content is published.

5. Conclusion
It is now a critical time for the companies to start thinking about global websites, the
need is now stronger than ever. Local language sites provides a social framework for the
customers and partners to come together and interact with each other and helps in
building the brand. Using social help in improving the websites will surely be a
challenging but an immensely worthwhile task.
Sources:
http://www.webstandards.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
http://www.emc.com/domains/documentum/index.htm