Maintaining a reasonable level of quality and consistency across all of the content that gets into your customers’ hands has always been difficult to manage. It used to be possible when the majority of the content was written by groups of professional writers, and edited by professional editors. And generally distributed in only one language - English.

Today, however, your customers get content from all manner of sources that used to be only for internal consumption, where quality and consistency was less important.  And in today’s Global Economy, chances are that much of the customer facing content is translated, and distributed in more than one language, or at least to a large population of non-native speakers. This is where quality and consistency really pay off.

Using meaning-based natural language processing software, we’ve analyzed Translation Memories, Software UI Strings from very large systems, and large corpora of assorted customer facing content. And, we’ve found that nearly every set of content that we look at contains 15% to 25% redundancy, or more. 

For example:

• UI strings with 22 different ways of advising the user that “the start date must come before the end date,” “the end date must be later than the start date,” “start date must precede end date,” “the end date must be greater than or equal to the start date,” ...
• 129 variants of a simple sentence advising the user to “turn the switch to the RUN position”
• 16 variants of a sentence introducing a package list

A minor irritant to a native speaker, a bigger irritant for a non-native speaker or poor reader, and a major irritant for your CFO. Every one of those variants was translated in some cases to 30+ target languages. On the average, this kind of linguistic redundancy adds 20% to the cost of translation. Put another way, if you currently translate to five languages, and could eliminate this redundancy in your source, your savings would be great enough to translate to an additional language, and open up a new market.

This presentation will discuss these and other relevant content quality issues in depth, suggest ways to deal effectively with them, and present real-world examples of companies that have ‘been there, done that.

This presentation will follow along the hilly path as Siemens Building Technologies’ Integration Department took Single Sourcing documentation from concept to pilot project. I will use the “building a house” theme to explore the steps with a mixture of tasks, lessons learned, wins, and losses along the way. I will also discuss ways in which expanding and maintaining the single sourcing system, as well as using it every day as a department standard, is just as challenging as maintaining or expanding a home.

A new home means a new routine, a new route to work, and a new grocery store. Our daily use of XML as our main writing tool also means new processes, procedures, and resources. A new home may also mean new neighbors, roommates, maybe even out-of-town guests. A writing team made up of six members, all with varying backgrounds and areas of expertise requires the same negotiations and discussions as living with people with different needs and schedules. And training another department - a new project scope altogether - can be a bit like accommodating guests who may not have the same appetites, sleep schedules, and interests.

Find out how the Integration writing team faces these challenges every day, with every documentation set.

Content models show how documents, web sites, manuals, or any other information products are put together. Content models define structure. They tell authors what components to include, in what order, and whether components are mandatory or optional. Content models help authors to create consistent materials, whether they are working in a content management environment or not. But, defining the structure of information products is only the first step in working towards consistency. You also need to figure out how to write the content that goes into that structure, regardless of who is writing.

Writing content consistently ensures that it is reusable, that its reuse is transparent, and that all content appears unified whether it is reused or not. Writing content consistently makes content reusable and more usable.

In this session, you will learn:

• The role of an content model in defining structure
• How to create consistent structures for similar information types
• How to create reusable content to support different structures
• How to create writing guidelines that everyone can follow, ensuring your content is usable and reusable!

Yo’u will also see examples of different structures along with their writing guidelines to help you get started in creating your own.

XML and DITA for documentation and publishing boast extreme productivity and cost-savings, as well as revenue opportunities. But how can you build your case to executives to get the green light and show them that DITA is the path for future content?

Come to this session to discover your potential financial returns. Learn how to calculate the cost of your current processes, and calculate the potential savings with new technology for authoring, re-use automation, localization, review, and publishing. You can then use these ROI calculations for budget requests and business cases to senior executives, to set expectations with the team and stakeholders for future XML adoption, and track project success.

You’ll learn how to:

• Quantify and calculate savings in authoring, localization, reviewing, and publishing
• Build your business case for DITA including sample scenarios and calculations
• Communicate your proposed savings to senior executives
• Save 20 - 40% on authoring, 25-50% on localization costs, and over 50% on your existing publishing costs
• Explain how DITA adoption supports enterprise initiatives