Pillars of Centralization

Here’s why the six Pillars of Centralization are essential to help you create a successful centralized content strategy for your organization.

Pillar One: Speak the Same Language

The first pillar is based on the premise that as an organization, we must all speak the same language and use the same terminology from the beginning of product development, right through the product launch, and ensure that it’s maintained in translated content.

We must agree on what to call things, codify this shared knowledge in a common repository, and enforce this common language throughout our content and localization ecosystem.

It begins with a common language in your organization, especially for your customer-facing content.

The goal is to communicate the same message and core terminology, beginning within your organization and in all the languages spoken by your company’s customers, as accurately, and consistently as possible.

Pillar Two: Quality at Source

Having used the first pillar to create a common language, what methods can now be created and enforced to ensure it remains a consistent and living language that will ultimately reach and benefit your customers? 

For global enterprises that distribute content in multiple languages, terminology management is vital to convey information accurately.

Take advantage of content management tools to reuse content with differing products when it makes sense.

Validate and standardize your numerical content (date and time formats, units of measurement, currencies) and acronyms by language or region.

Build a localization process that scrubs your content organically as it passes through the various production gates.

Ensure your metadata and document naming conventions are consistent when creating your publications for your website and other forms of distribution, so your internal and external customers follow a consistent and logical search routine to find the information they need.

Pillar Three: Use the Same Tools and Materials

Having built the first two pillars to create a common language and quality at source, we now focus on ensuring that we all use the same tools and materials. 

When we think of workflows and system automation, it can be helpful to break these functions and components down to their simplest building blocks.

Input: The materials and resources needed to complete a step in a process chain. 

Transformation: The specific rules dictate how the input is received and what’s done with it.

Output: The materials and resources produced by this step then act as input to the next steps.

The third pillar emphasizes consistency in the workflow process and tools used. They can be designed to capture essential metrics, feed verified data to your automated processes, and support consistency across multiple content channels.

Pillar Four: Quality at Delivery

With three other pillars in place, it will be time to formalize your quality and cost assessments and ensure they are ongoing and sustainable, which brings us to the fourth pillar: quality at delivery.

For ensuring quality at delivery, have you considered using MT to convert translated content back to English for comparison with the original source content?

This innovative process has proven to be a huge quality and schedule compression breakthrough, as it allows expedited review by non-native speakers to flag questionable content for experts to reconcile.

It’s being constructed with a human linguistic review of critical content to capture error data while training AI and customizing MT engines.

The AI is learning to execute automated error flagging, text correction, and assign exception handling for further human review when necessary.

Pillar Five: Hire the Right Crew

The fifth pillar is hiring the right crew. Constructing a successful centralized process requires skilled architects and builders because it can be a lot of work and to manage all of this requires the right team of talent.

Gather input from the various disciplines creating your products. Your engineers, designers, and/or programmers should be sharing their feedback with your terminology team and technical writing team.

It’s critical that your content creation doesn’t occur in a vacuum and that organizational buy-in exists for the terminology to be used.

Pillar Six: Change the Blueprint When Required

The final pillar: change the blueprint when required.

Your process must continue to evolve to meet constant change, and this pillar gives you the tools to help with that. Consider:

Automation

Try to hasten whatever can be expedited through software, AI, and other automation tools, leaving room for humans to do what they do best with content: create, edit and assess.

Machine Translation

The rapid improvement in MT makes it a clear competitive advantage and game-changer that cannot be ignored. Be sure to design a good pilot project with suitable MT engines and gather all the data you can to make your case.

Maybe begin with something not directly customer-facing for Proof of Concept, get some wins, and keep moving toward the goal of MT with human post edit for more critical content.

The Takeaway

We live in times of rapid and constant change.

To meet the challenge, it’s essential to build coherent and shared processes that can adapt to this ever-changing landscape and stand the test of time.

If you’d like to a take a deeper dive into the Six Pillars of Centralization, check out the full video playlist.

If you are interested in building a successful content strategy for your organization, our team of specialists at Argos can help. Check out our Creative Services to see if one or more of our portfolio offers aligns with what you need. Reach out today. We’re standing by.

Let’s continue building!