This workshop is for anyone who would like to improve the quality of corporate information, and/or reduce localization costs and time-to-market. The presenter will demonstrate how a formal focus on quality drives down costs (especially translation costs) and time-to-market. That’s right: cost, quality, timeliness—you can finally have all three! Attendees will learn how investments in Information Quality Management produce cost and time reductions of 10% - 25% or more.

With a vocabulary of over 900,000 English words, we can express anything in many different ways—ranging from easy to understand and translate, to extremely difficult, to incomprehensible. And (surprise!), content that is difficult for a native English-speaker to understand, is even more difficult for a non-native speaker to understand, or to translate. Even if your content is still in “English only”, this workshop will give you insights, and introduce you to tools that will help you to communicate more effectively to diverse audiences.

We will start with an IQ self-assessment that asks the following questions:

1. Do you have Information Quality Standards?
2. Do you monitor, measure, and track conformance to these Standards?
3. Do you provide actionable, real-time feedback to Writers and Editors?
4. Do you collect Quality metrics consistently and objectively?
5. Are Information Quality metrics collected on every information product you deliver?
6. Are your metrics presented in a meaningful, actionable manner?
7. Can you conclusively demonstrate Quality improvements?
8. Can you tie time and cost reductions directly to Information Quality improvements>
9. Is your CFO happy with current translation/localization costs?

You get 20 points for each question you can answer with an honest “"Yes".” If your IQ score is 160+, your company is an early adopter of Natural Language Processing technology, and you can go to one of the other workshops.

If your score is 140 or lower, you might want to stop in to learn what the early adopters know, and how you can apply that knowledge to help improve your company’s IQ.  Specifically, you will learn about: 
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• Proven, Quality Management principles that have been successfully applied across many manufacturing, engineering, and software development processes (6-Sigma, ISO 9000, Kaisen)
  
  • The application of these principles to the content supply chain
• Information Quality Standards and Metrics
• Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC)
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology and how it is applied to analyze content for
  
  • Correct spelling, grammar, and terminology usage
  • Conformance to Corporate and/or Industry Information Standards
  • Reuse opportunities at the phrase- and sentence-level
• Tools that enable
  
  • QA—real-time feedback in native authoring, editing, and localization environments
  • QC—automatic, independent generation and tracking of meaningful, objective Information Quality metrics and reports

NOTE: attendees are encouraged to bring electronic copies of real documents (.txt, .htm/.html, .xml, .doc, .docx, .fm.) for real-time demonstrations of tool capabilities. 

The session will also include discussion of real-world applications of these tools and processes, and the resulting impact on quality, translatability, and overall cost and time-to-market.