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Roma and Modular Content

posted 2006-11-01 14:23:59
by Andrew Thomas

One great benefit of working in the localization industry, you certainly have more opportunities to travel. I was lucky to get the chance to visit Rome, Italy, during EMC's Momentum conference. Talk about history! Everywhere you turn there's an amazing piece of Roman architecture waiting to take your breath away. I saw the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, and of course, the Vatican's Sistine Chapel (photos in this entry by yours truly). And don't get me started about Rome being the birthplace of all Romance languages (my personal favorite being French, though Italian is quite lovely).

Mind you, it wasn't all tourist traps and Roman history. I also got to sit in on some interesting sessions during the conference. XMetaL (a JustSystems company) and PTC are both technical partners of ours, and they each gave presentations. Adi Kabazo gave a wonderful talk on XMetaL’s offering around DITA, and Vincent Savard also discussed XML for technical documentation, referencing Arbortext of course. Both pointed out the advantages of their respective approaches as they relate to localization.

 

One theme that really struck me was the concept of modularizing content. While they each discussed using DITA for technical documentation, the reasoning applies just as much to OGWA for your website, or smartly organizing collateral and software strings for content reuse. Making content more modular allows for more incremental development which is vital to translating earlier and better with the goal of global simship. It’s clear from the presentations that we've got some very mature tools already on the market that can deliver just this sort of solution to the Enterprise. It amazes me that many companies aren't yet taking advantage of these tools, and more importantly, this modular approach. It's sort of how I reacted to Gmail when it first came out with labels for organizing email instead of folders. Once a paradigm shift comes along that redefines how things get done, why would you ever want do things the old way?

 

Modular content is the latest of these shifts in localization. One of the hurdles to overcome, however, is the required involvement of the content creators. Those of us in the industry have fought long and hard to move localization up the creation lifecycle, closer and closer to the point of origin. We've seen the benefit of smartly internationalized source content. Making that happen though is often an arduous process of evangelizing and educating. With tools like XMetaL Author and Arbortext, the pain is significantly lowered for user acceptance.

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