Localization News & Articles

2012 is poised to be the year of the customer. During lean economic times, every consumer is looking for ways to not only stretch the budget, but expecting to feel like every dollar spent delivers high value. Companies will be wise to develop strategies which yield the end result of customers feeling like they are amply receiving everything they paid for. In the end, there is only real strategy when it comes to customer experience management: giving the customers what they want.

It’s no secret that in the past year, the words “customer experience” and “customer engagement” have become more prominent. As companies become better acquainted with their customers, their goals and expectations, the better they can tailor the way they deliver information, develop products and otherwise engage with their users.

We live in a truly global world.

All over the globe, people are logging on and logging in from their respective countries. It makes sense that people want to use the web to reach out to a global audience.

So much so that the W3C project recently released its internationalization checker, so you can check how well your site “internationalizes.” But what is internationalization, how does it relate to localization and why do you need to know them?

More companies than you think are managing content in multiple languages, but unfortunately few of them do it well. The latest free report from Outsell Gilbane shares the most recent developments in multilingual content management.

Globalization has brought about the importance of localization, as many businesses will realize. Having your content online is the first step. Being able to localize and contextualize it to match your audience will help further your reach. The latest launch of Hippo CMS (news, site) incorporates various features that make localization and contextualization easier.

It’s been three years since SDL (news, site) bought Idiom Technologies for US$ 21.7 million and has, since then, been developing its translation abilities at quite a rate. This week, it announced the release of SDL WorldServer 2011, which brings it all to another level -- SDL says -- with the alignment of WorldServer 2011 with SDL Trados Studio.

The first two words of WWW mean "world wide," and this is one important aspect of the Web that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (news, site) is currently focusing on. With about 2 billion Internet users around the world across continents, not everyone is speaking the same language. Given the relative increase in use of non-English languages in Web content, the W3C recognizes the importance of standardizing access to multilingual content for best compatibility and usability.

Alfresco (news, site) has released five new versions of its open source Community Edition to increase the product's global appeal.

China is considered to be a rapidly growing market when it comes to social media use. With about 425 million Internet users and a rich social media scene, the conversations and data in Chinese websites and social networks will require capable means of analysis for effective data and conversation mining. Two social media consultancies have recently struck a strategic partnership, aiming to offer their expertise to businesses with interest in effectively engaging this market.

Never one to slow down it seems, DotNetNuke (news, site) has some new capabilities across its range of open source web content management editions, and a new edition altogether.

It may be summer and the middle of what newspapers call the silly season, but there is still a constant trickle of new document management releases. Amongst this week’s highlights are more details on the Mac Office release in October, while Doculex announces the availability of new document management services. Laserfiche and SharePoint also got officially DoD certified.

Common Sense Advisory analyst firm recently released their rankings of 16 content management systems attempting to answer the following question: “Which CMS delivers the best support for multilingual and multiregional use?”

When Day Software (news, site) upgraded its content management platform to CQ5.3 it came with a number of useful enhancements, but no translation abilities. Day has just rectified that by teaming up with Translations.com to produce a quick-response solution to enable companies to launch localized products in numerous languages.

For companies where the principal barriers to market expansion have been localization issues, Lionbridge (news, site) and IBM (news, site) have just announced a partnership that could go a long way to helping by providing instantaneous translation of content between different language areas.

The spring has sprung, Magnolia blooms again. No, this is not another installation of #CMShaiku contest; it’s a release of version 4.3 of Magnolia CMS (news, site) that brings new templating capabilities designed for multi-language/multi-site content management scenarios, support for Groovy and Magnolia Store for modules management.