Arbortext and acrolinx Partnership Raises the Bar for Global Documentation Quality

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Global Watchtower

Common Sense Advisory Blogs

Posted by Donald A. DePalma on June 28, 2005 in the following blogs: Technology, Translation and Localization
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Text quantity and quality have spun out of control at most companies. For quality, many rely on spellcheckers and prescriptive grammar tools, defaulting to what comes shrink-wrapped with Word or FrameMaker. These offerings have two fundamental flaws: 1) They examine content only on the PC or Mac where they're installed, thus abandoning the idea of collective dictionaries, grammars, and style guides; and 2) they work only within the tool or suite they came with, preventing Adobe, Microsoft, and OpenOffice users from sharing best practices across the enterprise.

Berlin-based acrolinx (yes, that's a lowercase ee cummings-style name) was spun off from the Language Technology Lab of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) to address these shortcomings. Its main product, acrocheck (also lowercase, but that violates one of our writing rules, so goodbye lowercase runes), provides collective spelling and grammar checks for Word, FrameMaker, XMetal, Arbortext EPIC, AuthorIT, and Trados TagEditor. Acrocheck's client/server architecture establishes a shared foundation for corporate style and editing. It suggests changes from a shared rules repository, but it is up to the human editor to accept the changes, Acrocheck logs the editor's decision to comply or not.

Managers use Acrocheck's reporting function to review an individual's compliance with quality metrics for a single document or an entire project. That puts Acrocheck on our second level of quality assurance management: 1) voluntary compliance is the most basic and the least effective method; 2) monitored compliance as in Acrocheck; and 3) mandatory compliance as provided by controlled language solutions (e.g., AECMA, Boeing, and Smart Controlled English) -- these are the most effective, but also the least liked and followed.

This technology relationship with Arbortext complements similar announcements from earlier this year with Schema (XML-based CMS for tech docs, in Germany) and AuthorIT (XML-based single-source authoring and management, in New Zealand). As a small company, Acrolinx has a tiny sales force. To make up for too few feet on the ground, it partners with smaller CMS suppliers selling to tightly-focused technical documentation groups. This strategy has gotten Acrolinx into SAP and Symantec.

An entry-level configuration of Acrocheck -- a server, five concurrent user licenses, and a pilot implementation -- costs €40,000 (last week a euro bought US$1.19). While this is a reasonable price to pay for these features, it's still too much for many smaller documentation groups -- especially if they lay out big bucks for their CMS solutions. In 2006 Acrolinx plans to roll out a single-user version of Acrocheck to get its foot into more price-sensitive doors. A web-based offering would also meet the needs of more customers. Neither entry could come too soon.

With too many documents on their servers, many of them badly written and with too many words, we contend that companies must become more authoritarian with content development and processing. Tools like Acrocheck are a necessary complement to the discipline that companies must instill in their authoring teams. Cash incentives for following best practices, training in volume-reduction methodologies such as ArchiText's Abreve, and reuse following single-source principles round out the arsenal of content optimization tools.

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