Multilingual Product Content: Transforming Traditional Practices into Global Content Value Chains.

Research Report
Multilingual
Product Content:
Transforming Traditional Practices to Global Content Value Chains
June, 2009
The Gilbane Group



Extract: Adobe Systems Best Practices Profile



Multilingual Product Content: Adobe Systems Best Practices Profile
Adobe Systems A leader in design and publishing technology for over 25 years, Adobe Systems has $3.5 billion in revenue and over 7,100 employees. It offers business, creative, and mobile software solutions that focus on how the world engages with ideas and information, including the well-known Flash® Professional, Adobe® Reader®, Photoshop®, Dreamweaver®, FrameMaker®, InDesign®, and After Effects® products.
Adobe generates over 50% of its revenue from outside the United States. Its products are in use on 98% of the world's Internet-enabled desktops. With its large, global customer base, and long commitment to localization and translation, Adobe has developed a truly global infrastructure - with the people, processes, and technology - for multilingual product communications.
Focus on the Globalization Team
Globalization is a team of 100+ people around the world responsible for the internationalization standards and best practices across the company. The group delivers Adobe's localized products, and the corresponding marketing, operational, and support information, including global product and brand content (packaging, collaterals, web & interactive). The Globalization team has the distinction of playing both tactical and strategic roles for Adobe.
The group leads efforts to promote corporate-wide global thinking, improve product "world readiness", and support Adobe's geographic expansion strategy, ultimately enabling Adobe to grow and scale to address the needs of all customer types in the global marketplace.
In its work with engineering, the Globalization team drives the development of Adobe's localized products through a unique offering of localization/ translation tools and services. Major deliverables from the Globalization team include operations and best practice guides. Additional deliverables include global product content for Adobe websites, online help, and customer support materials, as well as specialized materials like scripting guides and product release notes.
This team is part of the larger Adobe Experience and Technology Organization (XTO), which authors technical documentation in addition to managing web content, digital imaging, design layout, and video production. All of XTO is tasked with ensuring a high level of quality and accuracy for product communications.
Content Globalization Challenges
Underlying all Adobe activities are the key corporate drivers of reducing costs, increasing customer satisfaction, and improving quality. These drivers are common to many large, multinational corporations, all of whom must figure out how to build efficiencies into their operations as they continue to innovate.
©2009 Gilbane Group, Inc. 1 http://gilbane.com Multilingual Product Content: Adobe Systems Best Practices Profile
Because the Adobe brand and reputation is directed at "creative" users around the world, the Globalization team faces major challenges in delivering these creative applications for use in the local languages. In this context, the team must add new languages to their portfolio at the same time they are tasked to address a greater number of geographic markets at varying levels of maturity and financial health - and they must do this (like most other global enterprises) in an environment where there's increasing pressure to reduce resources and expenses.
The Solution
Adobe's Global Content Value Chain (GCVC) addresses a solid set of the people, processes, and technology required for a flexible, scalable infrastructure. The technologies deployed by Adobe are evidence of the breadth of capabilities and competence residing within Adobe:
GCVC Function GCVC Technologies ?Create Structured authoring software ? Terminology data base ? Translation Memory and Machine Translation Localize/Translate ? Multilingual terminology management ? Language Service Providers (LSPs) for translation and value added services ?Manage Web content management software ? Document management software ... [download for more]