About Advocating Global
A blog designed to support globally minded communication professionals with insight into the global communication strategies that lead to desired behavior and positive end-user outcomes. We write and invite experts to write in about global communication topics in healthcare, corporate communications and marketing, as well as best practices in localization and process management.
Our topics may vary, but our focus is always on the advocacy for the communications professional; to empower them with the tools and best practices to be a global leader and make a difference in the outcomes of the end-user.
Understanding Localization Maturity
Localization Maturity is about matching your organization’s expectations on global communication outcomes with the right people, processes and technologies. As organizations grow and their localization (translation) needs grow, that organization will have to move through stages of maturity. Our Global Communication Maturity Model™ 2.0 shows an enhanced view of the stages through which organizations will progress when implementing a global communications strategy. Each stage represents a point in time when an organization faces unique challenges that must be met and built upon in order to move forward on their global business path.
Five Thoughts on Agile Translation
Agile is becoming an ubiquitous term in business. Here are a few thoughs around the Agile mindset as it relates to the Translation or Localization industry.
Identification of foreign languages in translation
When you work with languages all the time, it gets easier to identify languages instantly and notice mistakes without even knowing the meaning. For instance, you don’t need to know anything about the Chinese written language to quickly see whether or not your content...
Questioning the Role of Translation
This blog is a first attempt to dig into the greater question: what’s the Role of Translation? The Translation Industry is a rather obscure service industry that has gained a lot of attention in the media due to technological innovation and sometimes also through...
What happens after a Translation Quote loss?
Every business deals with proposals that end up in a loss and with us, that proposal may be a translation quote. A loss that happens is an opportunity for us to learn about how we do business. An important first step of any quoting process is trying to...
Translating Conditional Statements in Mail Merge Fields
Translating Conditional Statements in Word is a challenge because our industry does not seem to have quite figured out how to process these. Sometimes you have to resort to the old fashioned of working, realizing it will pay off in the long run.
Added Value with the Translation Preparation Process
The translation process can be negatively affected by a poorly formatted document. The translation workflow is often oversimplified by our own industry through the expectation that translation is a simple “word” business. However, when you look at the details of the translation workflow from start to end, there are a lot of process principles that are relevant to translation quality.
When does Global Competence Stick?
We talk a lot about building up Global Competence in the organization, but what does it mean? Does it mean that everyone in the organization needs to know the ins and outs of Global Commerce? Does it mean that everyone is Culturally Sensitive? When does Global...
How John Deere got me thinking about Translation Productivity
In a John Deere commercial we see how a customer receives an eye opening statement from the salesman: “It’s not how fast you mow, it’s how well you mow fast”. It got me thinking how this slogan could relate to translation productivity (why not?).
Translating in Word: Formatting a Bilingual Word Document
The situation is this: You have a document set up with styles, chapter numbers and a table of contents and you want to translate the document and present it in a side-by-side bilingual format. However, there are a few things in Word that could drive you nuts if you don’t set up your styles correctly.
Translation Software Compatibility
Discussion about translation software compatibility which is useful for translators and other LSPs.