Most companies that we talk to translate websites or documents at or near the end of a development cycle. In an ideal world, those operations would be integral steps in the march toward global markets. At our Vendor Management Colloquia in London, Playa del Carmen, and Sunnyvale, vendor managers reserved their harshest criticism for authoring. They noted that “there are many more people creating content than translating it,” the big budgetary mismatch between that authoring and localization, and the fact that authors can do a lot to improve the downstream translatability of their oeuvre.

Compounding these problems is the fact that many high-tech firms now develop and support products internationally — that means that they have also begun authoring in English in non-Anglophone countries like China, Czech Republic, and Russia. Regardless of where the source documents are written, localization vendor managers would love to get writers using standard tools, formats, and corporate styles; these are all tactics that would improve the localization team’s ability to process it. We found that many vendor managers are reviewing a range of linguistic tools to help content creators deliver clean source to downstream translator — these include acrolinx’s acrocheck, Lionbridge’s linguistic toolkit in Freeway, and SDL’s AuthorAssistant.

Such products are pumping up for the next wave of corporate use. This week SDL announced Global Authoring Management System, a server-based version of AuthorAssistant. Big changes for the Global AMS solution (SDL doesn’t like to abbreviate it as “GAMS,” for obvious reasons) include:

• Residence on the server that enables enterprise-wide management, collaboration, and life cycle support, giving more force to SDL’s claim of global information management.
• Enhanced linguistic and grammatical smarts based on user feedback and heuristics. The tool gauges the impact of style and linguistic changes on translation costs on a rule-by-basis.
• Tight workflow with rules for SDL’s Knowledge-based Translation Server (KbTS) that help authors create content better suited for MT. The rules are based on the company’s experience with automated translation.
• Support for English, French, and German source. Other languages could be in the offing once enough manufacturers and high-tech shops — the dominant users of AuthorAssistant to date — decide to start sourcing content in other languages.
• Integration with authoring tools such as Adobe FrameMaker, PTC Arbortext Editor, JustSystems XMetal, and Microsoft Word. Connections with SDL’s Tridion CMS and Trisoft are still missing in action, but they are likely targets in the future.

If tools like these are used systematically with results measured and acted on, the words will improve and, in turn, increase the likelihood of better output in other languages and derivative works. However, translation groups rarely have the power to enforce better practices upstream. We anticipate that many will use tools like GAMS to rewrite the source they get from publications and development groups. That new and improved source will become the inter-language for subsequent translations.