Big content: Emerging challenges and solutions

According to Copyblogger 'content marketing'

means creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.

I went looking for a broader definition, but this will do for the moment.

'Big content' is, obviously enough, content on a large scale.

Like many of the blogs, websites, ebooks and more previously mentioned in these pages, publications like 101 Things a Translator Needs to Know and A French-English Glossary of Naval Technology target smaller language service teams catering for "high-end" clients with small- to medium-scale needs. The solutions are good, but they lack the scalability to meet the needs of big content clients.

Sure, the big translation companies have long claimed to meet these needs, but high-end teams have consistently found that this cannot be achieved without compromising on quality.

Recently, I have observed a groundswell of initiatives to improve the quality of the language services offered to big content clients.
As far as I can determine, the movement is being led by language service providers targeting corporations with big content needs including new approaches source texts in English and translation, transcreation and localisation into several or even many languages at once.
The signs include: (i) Watch Your Tone!, Why Your Company's Tone of Voice Matters and How to Get it Right, (ii) Speak with One Voice, How to Gain Competitive Advantage in the Content Era (register here to download for free), (iii) the Acrolinx Content Optimization Platform and (iv) the Microsoft Manual of Style for technical communicators. (Hardly what you'd call a broad survey, but at least these are concrete examples.)

Although this is not my field — I like to consider myself a small-time supplier catering for a niche market defined by one language pair, one direction and a small cluster of technologies and clients that I believe I understand pretty well — I nevertheless want to record the following observations and comments:

• First, referring to items i and ii, it's always good to see good writing about good writing.
• Second, while high-end suppliers have long tried to work closely with their clients to improve the quality of both source- and target-language documents, I have not previously observed a success comparable to that revealed by the way the new Microsoft style guide has adopted the concept of 'voice'.
• If Microsoft can get in-house and contract communication teams to apply the English-language version of its new style guide, we can look forward to a radical improvement in the quality of Microsoft translations.
• Scalability remains the big challenge. All of the high-end language service teams I've worked with have consistently found it exceedingly difficult to recruit staff with the mother-tongue writing skills combined with subject knowledge and translation skills to meet big content challenges. It will be interesting to see if the new wave of trend leaders can do better.
• The challenge of selling the concept of voice as applied to target-language documents is many times larger than that of selling the concept for source-language content creation in English. The fact that Acrolinx has so far failed to reply to the question raised in Acrolinx #3 below suggests that they too may have underestimated the challenge.

MS style manual adopts 'voice'

'Voice' (aka 'tone') now appears to be part of the mainstream terminology in technical communication following its adoption by the Microsoft Manual of Style for technical communicators.

Key quote:

Microsoft style and voice: This chapter highlights the shift toward a lighter,
friendlier tone in Microsoft content, with succinct guidelines for writing in the
Microsoft voice.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft's language service providers handle this if and when the manual is translated into other languages.

Elsewhere

• The Multilizer Translation Blog has listed "voice-based marketing translation" as Key trend # 3 in its Five key trends in Marketing translation for 2016.
• On 20 January, the Silver Tongue blog posted on Copy vs. content.

French government takes bold step in internationalisation

The French government has published a pdf document listing the official designations of French government ministers and ministries in FR, EN, ES, IT and PT. Download it here.

The list is preceded by the following brief explanation:

Le Groupe de travail interministériel sur la traduction (GIT) a confié à son atelier de terminologieadministrative le soin de produire les équivalents en cinq langues étrangères des fonctions et desentités du Gouvernement français, et d’actualiser cette double liste fonctions / entités au fil deschangements de gouvernement et des remaniements.Pour élaborer cette liste, l’Atelier a notamment sollicité les avis de ses contacts dans lesambassades et dans les administrations étrangères, et a procédé à la plus large consultation de lapresse étrangère.

The initiative is to be commended.

I have long recommended that clients provide this type of information in target languages identified by their marketing teams for the benefit of anyone and everyone writing about their company, products, activities, etc. How else can a corporation ensure consistent naming, designations and terminology in key languages?

Acrolinx #3

On 14 January, I sent the following email to Acrolinx:

Here is a question for Andrew Bredenkamp​ or one of his team, possibly a "tone of voice" specialist at Acrolinx Europe in Germany.

In my recent blog post on Acrolinx #1, I asked the question:

DE-to-EN colleagues inform me that even bilingual DE-EN (but DE mother tongue) executives consider the use of 'you' in EN versions of their annual reports and the like strictly taboo because the equivalent is strictly taboo in German. These colleagues also assure me that this is true even for companies that have adopted the 'one face to the customer' concept and published corporate design manuals and style guides in DE and EN. How does Acrolinx software deal with this?

​And here is a subsidiary question:
Assuming that the Acrolinx Germany team agrees that critical C-suite documents in English for German customers need to consider the use of 'you' when addressing readers, how do they convince German-mother-tongue customers that this is the way to go?

I look forward keenly to your reply.

I have yet to receive a reply. Perhaps someone from Acrolinx will post a comment here ...

Acrolinx #2

First, a snippet of information from CommonSenseAdvisory:

45 minutes ago

   In June 2015, we estimated size of global language services market in 2016 at US $40.8 billion.

Some comments on Watch Your Tone!, Why Your Company's Tone of Voice Matters, and How to Get it Right

This ebook by Ann Handley* is distributed via the Acrolinx site. Register for free download here.

* Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketProfs and author of EVERYBODY WRITES, Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content.

(SD thinks to self: Why did author Ann Hadley add a comma after 'Matters'?)

Quote: I believe that good writing is something anyone can produce.
Comment (SD): Either this is very wishful thinking or we live in different worlds.

Good writing is rare precisely because most people can't do it. 

See, for instance, Skapinker on Pinker on style. 

Yes training can help, but only when the trainee has a modicum of raw language talent.

Quote: In B2B, tone of voice is a story that’s just beginning. Most companies haven’t woken up to the idea at all. A few have taken great strides. But almost none have successfully transformed the way they use language — and that opens up a huge opportunity.

Comment (SD): Sounds promising.

Quote: Your customers see all your communications as parts of a whole, so you should too.
Comment (SD): Serious over-simplification. Different types of readers seek different types of documentation and have different expectations. Anyway, who can afford to have their best writers working for months on end on 'for information' documents for engineers and technicians.

Quote: Good jargon signals that you’re part of a community, and saves time too.
Comment (SD): Agree entirely. I have blogged on precisely this several times. Most online advice on writing concerns general journalism for lay readers resulting in ill-thought-out guidelines making it more difficult to develop and apply a consistent tone or voice.

Quote: The prescriptive view is that we should respect and obey the rules of grammar whether we agree with them or not. The descriptive view is that the right way to use language is the way people actually use it in speech and writing, not as reflected in rules created by academics.
Comment (SD):  Agree entirely. See The one grammar rule that really counts.

Quote: For example, English and other Northern European languages put a strong emphasis on logical structure. In French or Spanish, however, this style can sound dull, because digressions are seen as a sign of intellect rather than disorganization. In Asian languages, because of concerns about losing face, people talk around the subject to present all sides of the issue without explicitly stating their conclusion*. * The Little Book of Transcreation, p. 14. Free download from transcreation agency Mother Tongue.

Comment (SD):  Now you're dealing with issues that rightly suggest that translation and transcreation often call for a different voice in a target language from that adopted in the source language, which, in turn, calls for additional skills and significantly bigger budgets.

Quote: Since tone of voice is flexible, some documents may need more localization than others. High-profile marketing and advertising, which is much more likely to use tactics such as puns or cultural allusions, almost certainly needs localization. But even purely informational content, such as technical documentation, may suffer if translated literally, because motivations and attitudes differ so much across cultures. For example, while US training tends to be interactive and hands-on, French people tend to prefer more information, less participation**.

** The Little Book of Transcreation, p. 31
Comment (SD):  Same as above.

Plain language revolution in Portuguese

Here's a link that should be of interest to anyone writing for the general public in European Portuguese or buying translation services into PT-Eu, again for the general public.

Portugal now has a company specialising in plain Portuguese or Português Claro. For more information (in European Portuguese) go to Português Claro.

Sandra Fisher-Martins' excellent TED Talk The right to understand was filmed at TEDxO'Porto in March 2011.
Her TED Talk bio reads:

Sandra Fisher Martins helps Portuguese businesses and government agencies introduce clarity to their communications. After seeing a Plain English campaign in England, she was inspired to establish Português Claro — a consulting and training firm that works to ensure that people are not disenfranchised by what she calls an "information apartheid" that keeps the majority of her fellow Portuguese from fully understanding documents they need for their daily lives. She is working to develop Euro-clear, a European diploma in clear communication.

Translation Journal "interview"

Translation Journal has just published a piece on your truly as part of its Get to know our community series.

Here is the link: Get to know: Steve Dyson

Many thanks to the TJ team.