Jim Brown

Research Rap: Globalizing Product Documentation
June 5, 2008

A quick peek into some research on ... globalizing product documentation from Aberdeen Group points out the documentation-related challenges of launching global products. For anyone who has struggled with a consumer product with less-than-adequate (saying it nicely, insert your own term) instructions, you have experienced the challenge from the customer perspective. The manufacturers' perspective isn't much better.

Importance of Good Documentation
Product documentation is a core part of a product offering. While companies may be able to get away with poor documentation for a cheap consumer product, as the cost and complexity of the product goes up it is much less acceptable. The poor communication can move from a customer nuisance to a bigger issue. At a minimum, it will impact customer satisfaction. But it can also increase call center volume with inquiries, increase warranty claims from misused products, or even potentially become a safety issue.

Need for Speed
One challenge in producing good documentation is time. As product lifecycles have decreased and products are brought to market with increasing speed, documentation can now be the limiting factor in getting a product released. Aberdeen has done  some deep research in this area, primarily led by Chad Jackson, indicating that companies are combating this in a number of ways including decreasing the amount of text in the documents (for example by including more graphics), starting the documentation earlier in the product lifecycle (not waiting for the product designs to be complete, and by automating the creation of graphics from CAD drawings (in the appropriate industries).

To compound the issue of compressed product development cycles, many companies are moving toward concurrent product launches across the globe. So not only does the base language need to be developed in time for launch, but it has to be developed even earlier to allow time for translation into a number of languages.

How Companies are Addressing Translation
The Aberdeen report highlights several areas where Best-in-Class companies differ from Average companies:

• Formalize and standardize new term approval, term compliance, and outsourcing processes (many companies outsource the translation to a "language service provider" also known as "LSP"
• Deploy structured authoring and translation memory to increase reuse of localization content (structured authoring involves a "building block" approach where standard "chunks" (sorry for the advanced technical jargon) are stored and reused, so they can be written once, and then maintained and translated centrally
• Deploy structured authoring and translation management technologies to incrementally localize content (again, not waiting until the last minute)
• Securely share approved terms and translation memories with LSPs (translation memories are an interesting technology that allows past translations to be re-applied to new text

One very tangible impact of improved localization is the cost in localization. The report indicates that Laggards (who are not following the recommendations above, for the most part) have seen almost twice the increase in localization spend as the Best-in-Class. It seems clear from the report that there is a lot of room for improvement in most companies.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect reality? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective.

Posted by Jim Brown on June 5, 2008 | Comments (0)