Creating content for a global audience can seem daunting at first, but most best practices come down to practical guidelines and simple common sense. Document assets must be packaged in a consistent and specific way. Graphic assets must be tracked more specifically than with an English-only project. Effectively converting your content into target languages and locales involves a host of decisions:

• Are graphic images in your marketing materials potentially misunderstood or offensive?
• How can instructive graphics of device and equipment operation be created to minimize translations costs?
• How can source-file document templates be designed to allow “breathing room” for target languages that will increase word count and paragraph depth?
• What computer settings are required to enable you to view content published for Asian markets?
• When generating multiple outputs from single source publishing, how can content best be organized for optimal results?
• How can you select and qualify in-country review staff within your company to ensure that target languages are optimized for your audience?
• How can you reduce the turn-around time for in-country review?
• What can you do while authoring new content to maximize the leveraging of content from legacy files?
• How can you monitor your project’s progress as it advances through various milestones on the translation vendor’s end?

Attend this session to find out answers to these and even more critical questions that will help get the most out of your translation budget. The world is waiting for your product and accessible information to use it. Don’t be left behind as your competitors reach even further into expanding global markets.

As drug development expands globally, pharmaceutical project managers need to master management techniques, tools, and measures that transcend language, cultural, and geopolitical barriers. Industry leaders need to employ new technologies allow their global team members to collaborate better and to manage critical information on local, international, and global levels.

Pharmaceutical and other life sciences companies selling their products internationally typically adapt the offer, the product itself, the language, the website, the marketing collateral, its way of selling, how it delivers the product, and who supports it to the needs of doctors and other consumers in their target markets.

This presentation will outline the need, best practices, and enabling technologies for managing this critical function.

Gambro BCT, a medical device manufacturer, is diving in to the next generation of technical communications. This new environment consists of topic-based XML/DITA-structured authoring, automatic publishing, and the need increase the number of language offerings to support growth in additional and merging markets. All of this is to be done while continuing to follow regulatory guidelines.

In this discussion, Jennifer Perkins, the Technical Communications Manager, and Jennifer Linton, the XML/CMS Project Manager, provide helpful tips about each phase of the document lifecycle and what to consider when moving to an XML/DITA-based environment in a regulated industry. Do you have questions about how to support an XML/DITA-based and content and translation management system environment in your industry? This talk will provide you with some helpful tools and answers for you to move forward.

After about two and a half years of attempting to move to DITA and trying different content management system approaches, Gambro BCT is finally using the open source authoring standard, a content management system, and a translation management system. This new environment, called GEM (Globalization and English Management), is the basis for many new opportunities at Gambro BCT. They will share a brief overview of the organizational structure, tools infrastructure, and the regulatory standards needed to maintain this new environment. Then they will dive into some of the details about the discussions they had to solidify this working environment. These discussions include the information model, user guide for the content management system, persona descriptions, and process and procedure guides. For example, in their discussions, they determined that the document lifecycle needed to change to encourage regulatory signoff at a more granular level to promote a translations cost savings.

The presenters will also share the benefits that they foresee with this new environment as well as some lessons learned and next steps, including implementation of this system to develop training materials.

Today, life science industries are experiencing tremendous pressure from regulatory commissions to conform to mounting numbers of industry standards. At the same time, they must always look to improve cost and time efficiencies and maintain the highest levels of quality and safety.

All of these pressures present a daunting challenge for companies who then need to publish critical information into multiple languages around the world. They can no longer rely on paper-based, manual business processes that are time consuming and error prone.

Fortunately, new technologies can improve your ability to manage and translate information into multiple languages through a set of seamless business processes and best practices. 

Businesses can now:

• Simplify sharing and reuse of content and translations
• Reduce translation and localization costs
• Produce more accurate content in all languages
• Roll out new products faster
• Consolidate content to a single source for multi-channel delivery