Content Globalization and XML-based Content Creation: Goes Together Like Chicken and Rice

Blogger: Craig Roth

CMS Watch reported that

Translation and Content Management vendor SDL has taken a minority stake in privately held Trisoft N.V., a Belgian-based vendor of InfoShare, a component content management system (CCM). There was no fanfare, and in fact no announcement; evidently because it wasn't a full acquisition, the two companies dispensed with any press release. However, I think it's a significant move. When it comes to translation information management, XML; and in this case DITA-based XML, can matter. SDL had previously acquired Tridion, a Web CMS that can be used for component content management, early last year.

I think this is a good move by SDL, which has become quite a consolidator of globalization technology.  I haven't looked at InfoShare before, but buying into the XML-based content management market is prescient of SDL since component-oriented content is very useful for creating content that is going to be translated.

Four factors are compounded to increase the value of component-oriented content:

1. The number of localized variants that the content will be translated into

2. The number of formats that the content will be distributed in

3. The locality of the translation (e.g., needing to retranslate only one section of a document)

4. The frequency with which the content will be changed (thus necessitating retranslation)

When any of these four factors increase, component-oriented content creation starts looking better for any organization creating content that will be localized.  That means translation activities will be easier to track, take less time, make better use of translation memory, and be more consistent.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the KnowledgeForward blog

Comments

[sayen]

Getting it going on some of my blogs now.The practice is pretty global. See Ashanti Chicken (fowl).