2019 11-06 globalization

#LocWorld41
Globalization
Paul Cerda

#LocWorld41
Who am I?
© The Word in Bits, 2019
• A Globalization Consultant who helps companies assess their current infrastructure and processes and
helps to create a strategy and implementation for globalization across their whole organization.
• Former community college English teacher of research, and literature
• Former Platform Localization Program Manager who helped design infrastructure for Amazon

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Broad Generalizations
• Most organizations have not been designed to be global
• Most organizations launch internationally before planning globalization efforts
• Most back-end developers have not learned about internationalization
• Most front-end developers and UX designers have not designed for multiple
languages
• Most product managers have not launched international products
• Most content people have not maintained multiple locales or written for translation
• Most marketers have not used transcreation, or launched into non-English markets
• Most SEO people have no experience with localized content

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What is our goal?
1. Understand how the interaction between localization, internationalization,
and product help to set your globalization strategy.
2. Understand how to assess your organization's current globalization
infrastructure and processes.
3. Understand how to use the assessment to create a plan that will improve and
streamline your globalization efforts.
4. Understand the types of data that you need to decide how you launch
globally and the data that will garner support and investment.
5. Understand what your best options are for revenue growth internationally
and have a good idea of what that growth will cost you.

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Presentation highlights
• Globalization: What is it and why is it more than the sum of its parts?
• Discussions and strategies to design, deploy, scale, and adapt your product, service,
and business for global markets
• Help to create an action-plan for your company’s globalization efforts.

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Why Globalization?
• Support global expansion
• Create a viable worldwide product
• Delight customers
• Address regional and international restrictions and
requirements

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How to globalize?
Follow the money,
and make the gatekeepers your
friends.
-Bill Sullivan
Post LocWorld 2012 Keynote

Globalization: flywheel for Global Products
Globalization is.. . product
culturation supported and
sustained by
internationalized code and
localized content.
I18n
L10n
Product
culturation

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Code
Culturation
LanguageUX
Regs
What is globalization?
• The process of cultivating a product and services in the cultural soil of the new
market.

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How is your org structured?
• Most organizations are Product/ Design or Development focused
• This will decide how the organization approaches globalization and help you
identify issues you’ll face.
o Are the higher levels of management development or product/ design people?
oIs the vision of the company to create robust software or elegant experiences?
o What are your products known for?
o Where does your business most invest and what work is prioritized?

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Perspective is:
All a matter of where you are standing
• C-Level : COO, CEO, CMO, CGO, CSO, etc.
• Strategist: Marketing, dev architecture, product, support
• Production: loc, tech writers, marketing, CS, UX design
developers

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ADGILE
•Architectural
•Design
for
• Globalization
•Internationalization
and
•Localization
in
•Enterprises

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Snapshot of Product culturation
Product
Content/
Structure
Functionality
Geo, Locale specific adaptation

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• Adapt product to cultural sensibilities and expectations
• Provide cultural and linguistic adaptations for core product features
• Adhere to cultural norms and ensure the customer sees themselves as a
consumer of the product.

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Example of Product Culturation
• Which image will sell more e-book readers in Africa or Latin America?

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Ikea in Asia
• Designed furniture with different
materials for the heat
• Created new products
• Changed copy for new market
even though it is still English.
• Assembled furniture rather than
shipping it flat
• Changed showroom displays
https://www.fastcompany.com/90215773/how-ikea-quietly-tweaks-its-design-around-the-world

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Ikea in UK: Risks of getting it wrong
• Jerk chicken ingredients
were incorrect in their
UK stores. This caused
a bit of an uproar and
created bad publicity
for Ikea.
• They will recover, but
they had to act quickly
to address the issue
and apologize for their
mistake.
IKEA
Jamaica

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Internationalization tasks (I18n)
Prepare code to support locales: Make it localizable.
• Separation of content from code
• Transformations
• Data Storage
• Character encoding on all services, databases
• Integrate packages and libraries to do the heavy lifting

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Snapshot of I18n
I18n
Data
Function
Code

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Mojibake
• Mojibake occurs when
character encoding is
incorrect.
• Buttons have the
correct text because
they are images, but
rendered text is
scrambled because the
character encoding
does not match the
page settings.

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Hard-Coded Strings
• Hard-coded strings are
strings that have been
stored in the code rather
than abstracted into a
separate file that gets
pulled in at runtime.

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Pseudo-Localization: Example I18n prep• Start and end markers: All strings are
encapsulated in [ ]. If a developer doesn’t see
these characters they know the string has been
clipped by an inflexible UI element.
• Transformation of ASCII characters to extended
character equivalents: Stresses the UI from a
vertical line height perspective, tests font and
encoding support, and weeds out strings that
haven’t been externalized correctly (they will
not have the Pseudo Localization applied to
them).
• Padding text: Simulates translation induced
expansion. In our case we add “one two three
four”…etc after each string, simulating 40%
expansion. Note that we don’t apply expansion
to areas of the UI where text length has already
been limited by other systems prior to display
on the UI, doing so would cause false positives
( e.g. synopsis text, titles, etc. ).
https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/pseudo-localization-netflix-12fff76fbcbe

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ICU/ CLDR
Benefits: Manage the most difficult parts of I18n work
Date, time, currency, ordering, etc.
Detriments:
Message formatting creates issues for localization.

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Fluent (Mozilla)
• Asymmetric localization
• Asynchronous localization delivery
• Customizable fallback chain

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Localization (L10n)
• Translate
• Adapt colors, icons, buttons, images, maps, etc.
• Make a locale-specific product

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Production
Content
and
Metadata
MetricsTools
Back
Office
WELD: Whole Enterprise Loc Design

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Snapshot of Production Localization
L10n
Cost
Time
Quality

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Production: Translation and localization
The PM, engineering, and translation work to extract, transform, translate,
transcreate, and ingest localized content, and images used for globalized products
and services. Continuous improvement calls for tweaking cost time and quality.
Decisions about levels of localization, human or machines, tools, and processes
fall to those tasked with localization.
Ops
Cost
Time
Quality

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Production: The Players
The PM, engineering, and translation work to extract, transform, translate,
transcreate, and ingest localized content, and images used for globalized products
and services.
Ops
Loc PM
Engineer
Translators
MLV/SLV

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Back Office Concerns
Easing the pain of internal customers
Payment processes, fund reallocation, IP holdings, worker classification, tax, legal,
finance, and other elements.
Back
Office
Finance
Legal
Tax

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Back Office: The Players
Back
Office
Finance
teams
Lawyers
Tax
Lawyers

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Tools / Technologies Concerns
• Scaling and systematizing localization
Tools
1. The tools used for loc
production.
2. 2. The tools that
disseminate, transform
and ingest the source
and localized content.
Tools
Loc
Content
Lifecycle
Technologies
Tech:
API
MTs
AI
VUI

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Tools / Technologies Players
• Scaling and systematizing localization
Players
Loc
Team
Content
Team
Dev
teams

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Content and Metadata Concerns: Creation
Content and Metadata
What is done with it: Ingestion, security, deployment, and transformation
Description: Metadata helps to identify content and usage so that the tools know
how to use or process it.
Data
Content,
Data types
Data
management
Data use

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Content and Metadata Players: Creation
• Who owns and parses the data?
Data and Metadata
• What is done with gathered data: Analytics, Machine Learning, Predictive analysis, AI, Product design
• What is done with created data: Lifecycle manager
Data
KM
teams
Support
teams
Product, Marketing, Sales teams

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Content and Metadata Concerns: Capture
Content and Metadata
What is done with it: Ingestion, analysis, transformation, product features,
Machine learning, AI
Description: Captured data is stored, mined, leveraged, and re-deployed
Data
Capture
Data
management
Data use

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Content and Metadata Players: Capture
• Who does things with the data?
Analytics, Machine Learning, Predictive analysis, AI, Product design
Data
Data
Analysts
ML
teams
SEO/ Product teams

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Metrics concerns: Proving your worth
Metrics
Each level of your business will measure something different. It is important to
know what they are measuring as the data will be useful for you to contextualize
and create valuations for your work.
Metrics
Operational
Divisional
C-Level

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Metrics Players
Each group will want different facets of your metrics for their operational and
strategic planning, reporting, and design. Providing the correct data will build
trust and win support.
Metrics
Development
team
Data
Analytics
SEO

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Assessment: Customer Journey
Each step in the customer journey corresponds to an area your company has to
globalize
Awareness
How do your
customers discover
you?
Interest
What is your value for
customers in different
locales and regions?
Consideration
How does your
offering compare to
regional competition?
Purchase
Purchase experience?
Product and return
life-cycle?
Retention
How do you retain
customers in different
regions?
Advocacy
How do customers
advocate for your
brand regionally?

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Assessment: Walk the site
The first thing to do is walk the site with an eye for customer-facing globalization issues.
• Once your site is discovered what is the copy they get?
• If they want to know more is the copy appropriate not only to their region and locale, but is
it accurate?
• If they want to sign up can they enter their name, address, and phone number without
issues in their locale?
• If you send follow up materials or marketing materials are they relevant targeted and in the
correct locales?
• If they want to pay you can you take their currency, quote your price in their currency, and
support the product in their language?
• If they want to share on social media is it easy, relevant, and specific to their locale and
regionally used social media platforms?

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Walkthrough: What are you looking for?
• Copy that won’t make sense when translated
• Issues with buttons and menus that won’t be able to expand or contract by 30%
• Anywhere you solicit information from users
• Any flattened images
• Any cultural assumptions (e.g. debit cards, colors, right-to-left language spacing)

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Assessment: Data Journey
A data journey is a way to track your
systems and tools used to modify text
you capture from customers.
This can be done as part of the walk
the site by tracking the data you
capture on the front end and
identifying any backend metadata or
usage you make of the data.
Data
Capturing
Transit
Security
Usage
Transforming
Storing

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Data Journey: What are you looking for?
• Development issues (hard-coding, sort, order)
• Security issues (GDPR, Encryption, API calls, plain-text passwords)
• Input issues (date, time, currency)
• Unnecessary data that is captured
• Financial data and formats

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Creating a Strategy
• Development: I18n, programming languages, backend data stores, security
• Content: Marketing, sales, SEO, Support
• Training for all teams and in which languages
• Evangelization across locales
• Metrics: Operational and financial (ROI, DAU, abandonment, etc.)

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Creating a Plan of Action
• Initial plan is the best attempt to capture work and priorities for launch, company
infrastructure, and revenue growth
• Prioritize essential items.
• Bring the initial plan to stakeholders as a doc for discussion to solicit feedback.
Encourage changes and solicit help from experts.
• Take the feedback and seek co-writers from the stakeholders

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External data for a new country
The business case will need to use
mostly external data but you should be
aware and be able to speak to the work
necessary to launch into a new country.
Nataly Kelly has a great post on where
you can find your external international
expansion data. Use it.
https://borntobeglobal.com/2019/07/23/the-best-international-
expansion-data-sources-for-digital-companies/
IX Data
Language
Proficiency
GDP
IPR
Credit
Cards?
Ease of Biz
Internal
data last

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ROI analysis
• Creating the ROI analysis can take many forms but it boils down to three questions.
1. What will it cost?
2. What will I get out of it?
3. What are my chances of success/ failure?
• It can take the form a 2x2 grid as both Nataly Kelly in her Born to be Global blog
and Pedro Gomez from Microsoft suggests in his LinkedIn article. Pedro focuses on
Impact and Effort while Nataly focuses on Market size and Market complexity.

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Getting Buy in
• Co-authors and other allies help to sell the plan up their chain and garner resources
and commitments for the plan
• Make clear the plan is cross-functional and make compromises to ensure consensus
• Once you have consensus amongst stakeholders build out metrics that will matter to
the c-level and begin collecting them.
• Use the metrics and the story to sell up to the X-level.

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Metrics
• Start with what matters to your company and organization.
• How does what you are doing align with the cross-company initiatives?
• What will the initiatives costs and how long before we see results?
• What metrics will you use to measure success? How do they relate to the company
initiatives.
• What are the most important KPIs or OKRs of your company and how does
launching in new countries or locales support them?
• Set realistic expectations by showing the potential and then explain the ramp up and costs of
the initiatives.
• Run small experiments and tests to gather insight and bolster your case. The less expensive
the better.
• If you’ve launched previous products or services in the region gather the data and use it.
• If there are similar countries in size or demographics use the data as support. But be sure to
explain there will be differences.

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Executing
• Though you don’t want to do something that is half-baked, it is a good idea to
move fast.
• It is best to have data and examples quickly rather than waiting to have a full
solution
• Action on at least one or two “low-hanging” projects while mapping out bigger
plans.

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Iterating
• You won’t get it right the first time. You should make that clear to stakeholders and
set short-term, medium-term and stretch goals.
• Iterating often will help show progress and perseverance.
• Iterations should be short in duration, inexpensive, and impactful

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Measuring and evangelizing success
With these three levels of data you have
enough information for evangelization.
• Why launch a new country?
• How have you improved launch times
and customer satisfaction?
• How have your new countries
performed?
• What have you accomplished?
• What could you do with further
investment?
C-Level
•Used to justify
expansion, support ROI,
and identify how
globalization supports to
enterprise vision.
Production
•This is “trains on time
data”. To be used to
improve quality and
processes and reduce
costs/ cycle times
Strategic
•These help you answer
where and why
questions.
•Where should we
launch? Why?

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Training
• If you expect this to
be a lasting
organizational
change you must
infuse this into the
learning of all
current and future
employees.
Product culturation
Working with G11n
I18n testing
Playbook per locale
Redesign for new
markets
UX design for
international
markets
Writing for L10n
Structured authoring
Integrating L10n into
content dev
Multilingual glossary
and style guides
Tracking and
correcting source
errors found in Loc
Pseudo-loc
I18n development
I18n and L10n
testing
Pseudo-loc
Database
configuration
UI design
Product Manager Content Writer Developers

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Training Developers
The trick is to balance ease of use and enforcement. If the tools slow down
development but prevent rework you’ll need to assess the importance of each.
• Developer bootcamp
• Code check
• Continuous deployment integration

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Training Product People
• Product people need to understand that the product will change and as it does they
will soon be managing a portfolio rather than a single product.
• Netflix offerings differ by region. Licensing, legal and business considerations affect
the offerings in each region.
• A single product may have different features by locale.
• A Wishlist in Asia might be considered crass so the feature may need to be changed
or removed.
• Training them to address this will help them understand the requirement differences
by region and help them understand how to optimize for different locales.

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Training Content Creators
• Writing for translation is tricky
• Authors need to depend less on colloquialisms
• Screenshots should use transparencies so there is no text in flattened images.
• There should be work done on terminology prior to international launchers
• Integration between CMS, TMS, and authoring systems need to be understood.
• What is the authoritative source?
• How does data move between them?

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Scaling
• Translation: How do you translate when you need 40x or 400x the content?
• Quality: How do you measure quality of the product, translation, or build?
• Production: How do you manufacture more? Manage more translation?
• Support: Answer the phones?
• Lifecycle: Create, update, and deprecate content. What is your authoritative source?

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Linguistic Quality and how to scale it
• Automated objective quality
• Put vendors, tools, and metrics in place
for subjective quality
• Scaled subjective reviews
• Designed machine translation post-
editing (MTPE) efforts for vendor and
tools
• Automated MT quality reviews
Quality
Objective
Subjective
Human
quality at
scale
MTPE
MT and
MTPE
Quality at
scale

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History of MT
• One of the earliest goals for computers in the 1950’s
• Rule-based ruled the 80’s and 90’s
• 2000-2015 SMT reined, with a variety of strategies
• 2015-Present: Neural Machine Translation (NMT)
• 2018-Present: Unsupervised MT training

Machine Translation
Machine
Translation
Rule-Based
Statistical
Neural

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Post-edited machine translation
In-house
Vendor
Freelancer

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Enterprise design for localization
What does your organization look like?
Write it down before you review the rest of these slides. It
will help you to design a strategy to influence your
overall organization.

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The Enterprise parts: Client-Side
• The Wall: Disconnect between localization and rest of company. Localization often
seen as the last step and long-pole in international product.
• The Silo: Business units build their own infrastructures for localization and rarely
leverage a centralized set of tools, vendors or processes
• The Hub: Localization is a centralized or platform function shared across the
company.

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The handoffs and handbacks
Regardless of your tooling the enterprise infrastructure
will affect your overall work.
• Multiple TMS and CMS systems
• APIs
• SDK integrations
• Spreadsheets
• Resource Files

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The Wall
• The wall is common in localization. Every division sends the content over the wall to
localization and wait for the finished content to return.
Product Dev Content
Loc

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The Silo
• Many large enterprises silo their work and this creates many loc processes.
Biz 2Biz 1 Biz 3
Loc
Prod
Dev
Content
Prod
DevContent
Prod
DevContent
Loc
Loc

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The Silo and the Wall
• Many large enterprises have silos and walls. Loc teams work separately in horizontal
orgs.
Biz 2Biz 1 Biz 3
Loc
Prod
DevContent
Prod
DevContent
Prod
Dev
Content
Loc
Loc

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The Hub
• Many large enterprises make loc a hub. And these loc teams are conversant in the
product
Biz
3
Biz 5 Biz 2
Loc
Biz 1
Biz 4

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The Hub and Wall
• Many large enterprises make loc a hub. But they throw work over the wall to loc
teams.
Biz
3
Biz 5 Biz 2
Loc
Biz 1
Biz 4

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The Hub and Silo
• Some enterprises have central tools, but individual loc teams interact with an
enterprise localization team.
Product Dev Content Product Dev Content Product Dev Content
Enterprise localization Tools

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The Hub and Silo and Wall
• Some localization teams have content thrown over the wall and work with enterprise
loc teams to manage the content with little to no context.
Product Dev Content
Loc
Enterprise localization Tools
Product Dev ContentProduct Dev Content

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The MLV in the Silo and the Wall• Many large enterprises have silos and walls. Loc teams work separately in horizontal
orgs and they pass to MLVs who pass to SLVs who pass to linguists.
Biz 2Biz 1 Biz 3
Loc
Prod
DevContent
Prod
DevContent
Prod
DevContent
Loc
Loc

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MLV
• Multiple language vendor engages with large clients for millions of words and
multi-million dollar contracts.
• Amalgamators of capacity and large-scale problem solvers.
• Can staff and bring team in-house for short term spikes and long-term needs.

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SLV
• Specialists in a single language or multiple languages and dialects in a given region.
• Supply MLVs and occasionally enterprise clients for specific languages or regions
• Smaller volumes but they are closer to the linguists

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Translators/Linguists
• Terminology
• Tooling
• Style guides
• Content Preparation
• Tasks besides translation: MTPE, Engine Training, In-product linguistic testing

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Globalization: The whole enterprise
A whole enterprise approach helps you:
• Recognize the inter-dependence of content and tooling of your organization
• Articulate a story that links revenue, growth, and international customer
satisfaction.
• Target investment and show returns on international strategies
• Link localization, internationalization, and globalization with the core functions of
your enterprise.
• Gives you a seat at the table and may help you drive the agenda.

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