Common Sense Advisory

This bulletin reviews the results of Common Sense Advisory’s business confidence survey for the fourth quarter of 2009. For information about the history and methodology of the surveys, see “Global Business Confidence Survey,” Feb10).

This document reviews the history and documents the methodology for Common Sense Advisory's global business confidence survey, which has run since 2005.

To help enterprises solve the critical challenges of attracting and engaging global audiences, technology vendors must aggressively pursue specialized features for global content management. This report examines the system capabilities required for multilingual content management and the organizational support needed for multiregional deployment.

As one of the world’s largest economies, Russia plays an important role on both the European and the global stage. In the fields of translation and localization, Eastern Europe is steadily growing in importance. In this Quick Take, we discuss the amount of demand-side opportunity generated within Eastern Europe. We also discuss Russia’s role as one of Europe’s most lucrative markets for language services.

Since 2005, Common Sense Advisory has conducted quarterly surveys of buyers and suppliers to measure the confidence of the translation and localization sector. Our survey, based on a template from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development for such polls, asks about demand for language services, growth in employment, and obstacles to doing business. We query respondents about the quarter that just ended and about the upcoming 90 days. This report reveals the survey results for the most recent quarters of our ongoing analysis

With the escalating importance of community-based interactions for brand-building, customer service, and even revenue generation, this research examines current best practices and updates our take on content and logic requirements for global customer experience in online user forums. The Quick Take also includes pitfalls to avoid when setting up an online community.

How much does the U.S. federal government spent on translation and interpreting services? In this report, we review government expenditures from 1990 through 2009. We rank the top language services contractors for each year, and show which agencies spend the most, both yearly, and overall. We show detailed maps of supplier locations, and explain how budgetary priorities have changed over the year. We also look at correlations between political parties of U.S. presidents and spending habits, as well as the relationship between the federal budget, defense budget, and year-to-year language services expenditure.

The “cloud” has become the favored deployment option for translation management system (TMS) buyers. Recent announcements of more TMS products offered in hosted or software-as-a-service (SaaS) configurations promise to increase consideration of these choices, but prospective users should approach them with their eyes wide open. This Quick Take outlines the pros and cons of TMS in the cloud.

Imagine if, just to write your email address or access a web page, you had to write the URL in Arabic, Russian, Chinese, or some other script you don’t normally use and cannot even type on your keyboard. For most of the world’s population, this has been the unfortunate reality since the advent of the internet. Using e-mail, web, and other online applications was like wandering around in a city where they cannot read the street signs. No longer.

We recently attended a conference hosted by the Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) where association members gained access to know-how on language data normalization, organization, and utilization. They were also exposed to like-minded practitioners, new vendors, and lots of war stories. In this Quick Take, we discuss TAUS and its offshoot, the TAUS Data Association (TDA). We also consider the implications of this initiative to share language assets within and between industries.

This report goes beyond an overview of the status of the market to provide a strategic analysis of business data targeted to suppliers and buyers of language services. We estimate the size of the European language services market based on 37 main categories from the Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community (NACE), macroeconomic indicators, and other market drivers.

Landing Pages - There is no denying China’s growing importance on the global stage. China is investing more and more outside its borders – in numerous African countries, in many South America nations, and across the European continent. How does China’s increased trade with countries in Europe affect the language services industry? In this Quick Take, we explore the growing need for translation work in Chinese language combinations, and the use of English as a “pivot language” when direct translation is not possible.

How much opportunity is generated by organizations that purchase language services in European countries? In this Quick Take, we present estimates of the demand for language services in 46 European nations. We also explain our methodology, which incorporates gross domestic product (GDP), export volumes, immigration, and supply-side data used for our global language services market (LSM) estimates.

Where are all the translation and localization buyers, and in which industries do they most commonly work? In this Quick Take, we present a list of the 37 industries that matter most in the language services trade, across all geographic locations. We also include the standard industry identification codes and the correlations across different classification systems. This document will help buyers better determine where their industry falls in the big picture, and enable vendors of language services to more effectively categorize and target customers

Common Sense Advisory convened 30 large-scale buyers of translation services at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California for a colloquium on translation quality measurement. Business globalization leaders from Dell (Wayne Bourland), Google (Samir Patel), and Motorola (Elsebeth Flarup) shared their experiences in the form of case studies. Participants then spent time in group sessions drafting their “ideal-world” and “real-world” scenarios for quality measurement. In this Quick Take, we summarize the major findings and recommend what needs to take place to propel translation quality measurement to the next level.

Common Sense Advisory defines “transcreation” as a process by which new content is developed or adapted for a given target audience instead of merely translating existing material. It may include copywriting, image selection, font changes, and other transformations that tailor the message to the recipient. We’ve noted a steady increase in the number of inquiries from buyers regarding transcreation services, primarily for projects with a marketing orientation. In this Quick Take, we outline the major characteristics of transcreation and some best practices for obtaining these services.

This report documents how the most successful online brands succeed – or fail – in delivering a compelling customer experience for international visitors. How quickly a visitor finds relevant content determines whether that person ends up fully engaged in an online experience or instead drops off, disappointed. In this report, we examine the best practices for creating the optimal customer experience for global visitors. We review the most common navigation schemes – including which techniques work best and which ones should be avoided. Researching this report led us to visit 250 different websites, along with each language and country they offered. We synthesize this data to advise site builders how to minimize impediments that clutter the online customer experience and give clear directives on how to maximize speed and ease-of-use.

Companies in the Nordic region have traditionally been quick to develop or embrace advanced technologies to improve automation and reduce the high costs of human-delivered services for written language conversion. Conversely, suppliers in Nordic countries have been slow to create advanced solutions for handling their interpretation needs. In this Quick Take, we explain why Sweden is poised to lead the Nordic interpreting market – and perhaps the rest of Europe – out of innovation stagnation and into new levels of maturity through telephone interpreting (TI).

Language service providers (LSPs) frequently ask us about the best ways to handle the client review process for translation and localization. These questions often arise as a result of a prickly situation with the buyer-appointed reviewers. The problem may be as simple as the reviewer’s lack of relevant skills, or as complex as the LSP’s total loss of control over its final product. In this Quick Take, we show you how to avoid the most common client review pitfalls.

What does a language service provider (LSP) need to know in order to work with the largest public provider of translation services in the world? In this Quick Take, we reveal the findings from our interview with Juhani (Karl‐Johan) Lönnroth, the Director General of the European Commission’s translation service.