If you’re the type of person who likes to write, think, edit, and then publish , tink about the pain of re-using content from an article created in a word processing program to a blog entry. You had to go through and check things like apostrophes, quotation marks, and dashes to make sure you didn’t end up with question marks in the middle of your carefully-crafted prose. That can be called “dumb work” – silly rote tasks that don’t add any value at all.

Now, multiply that dumb work by millions when content gets locked into a proprietary system. You may have a million-dollar content management installation, but what happens when you want to use your content elsewhere, or when you need to migrate content between your behemoth system and specialty systems, such as a component content management system?

Unless there is a vested interest by, say, a competitor in providing some sort of import wizard from a specific proprietary format into their own format, your content is now held hostage by the vendor’s system. This used to be considered good business sense, as it locked you into their system for long periods of time. In today’s world, however, it’s considered a pretty bad move on everyone’s part. The recognition that content is a valuable corporate asset whose value increases with its potential for re-use has changed the game.

Re-use is a concept that is often discussed at too low of a level within the corporate sphere. There are several kinds of re-use:

• Single-sourcing. This isn’t a particularly sexy type of re-use, but is the industrial workhorse of re-use that is the backbone of any product or service provider that produces technical content (user, installation, maintenance, and quick-start guides, training material, knowledge bases, and so on). The ROI on standards-based, re-usable content becomes critical, particularly in cases where translation are involved.
• Integration. Content among departments, divisions, or partner companies may need to be mashed together to create a cohesive whole. Saving troublesome conversion steps toward a common format is a huge time-saver, and eliminates the worries that the conversion process has eliminated or corrupted critical content that affects the quality and integrity of the end result.
• Convergence. This re-use case is bringing together content from various types of sources, such as mixing single-sourced content with user-generated content in a knoweldge base. The need to “round-trip” content relies on being able to get content in and out of systems easily and quickly, with as much automation and as little human intervention as possible.
• Syndication. Content flies (or should fly) outside of the organization, in the form of news releases, event announcements, and so on. If content doesn’t conform to the standards-based formats – microformats is the most common example – then the value of automating syndiations is lost, with a default position of cutting and pasting into multiple sites.

Having content that can “play nice” with other systems is a key component of a good content strategy. Because large-scale content projects are dependent on the technologies that manage the content, it’s critical to look at how the system treats the content, and how open the content is for re-use in strategic ways.

Other times, the mid-stream transformation is done by humans, and ingested back into the system for further transformation. Localized content fits in this area, and the implications can be far-reaching. The drive to package content into neat little bundles, so that they can be re-used in multiple contexts, is difficult enough to carry out for a single language or homogeneous market. Writing to satisfy the complexities of multiple languages or localized markets creates exponential challenges. Further complicating the situation is the fact that the people charged with transforming your content are usually outsiders, and probably haven’t been included in the sessions that taught the concepts and developed the architecture for the new content order within your organization. Not only do your translators have to figure out how your content convergence strategy is intended to work for you, they have to figure out how to retain the accuracy and flavor of your intent across languages and cultures. It’s a tall order, and an aspect of content convergence often overlooked.

There’s an article, Anticipating the Impact of Content Convergence, in the January/February 2009 issue of Multilingual Computing that elaborates on some of the things translation professionals, and their clients, need to consider as the nature of content undergoes a profound change.

Creating translation-ready content is useful, whether the translation happens or not, because there are sure to be plenty of ESL readers who will need to decipher the English version. Localized content draws on guidelines from the Plain Language movement, from Controlled Language (or Controlled English or Controlled Technical English), and from the field of translation. There are visual elements to consider, as well as design elements. No matter how small the localization or internationalization initiative, there are sure to be unexpected considerations. Here are some resources that make that point:

You Talking to Me?: Usability for Global Audiences on a Shoestring Budget

Reaching Global Audiences: Doing More with Less

Following the Road Untraveled: From Source Language to Translation to Localization

Yours Truly International

High-Quality Content that Communicates Across Language Barriers

Case studies in Controlled Authoring