Leverage the Power of Your Knowledge Base

By Michael Rosenblatt

To be more efficient in providing multi-lingual support, you should take full advantage of your knowledge management applications. When it comes to developing a multilingual knowledge base, there are four major criteria to keep in mind. You should ask yourself these questions of your knowledge base (KB):

• Is it internationalized
• Is the metadata model extensible?
• Can you define content relationships?
• Does it have built in workflow tools?

Most current KM applications have all of the functionality to meet this set of criteria so what’s really important is that you leverage it. Let’s start with internationalization. The key here isn’t making sure that you’re using it, but making sure that if you are sharing data between applications, that the applications also share the encoding format. Unicode is the most universal format but a number of other encoding schemes exist. You’ll want to make sure that all of your applications communicate using the same encoding scheme or your data will come out garbled.

Some pre-Unicode schemes like: ISO 8859-1, Windows 1252 for Western Europe; ISO 8859-2, Windows 1250 for Eastern Europe; big5, euc-tw, and GB2312 for China; and shift_jis, euc-jp for Japan are less common but can present real issues for companies with legacy software.

Metadata and content relationships are probably the most important part of the setup of your knowledge base. Make sure you have the ability to create a global object model. You want to capture more than just the subject, topic, and author; you also want to include fields for translator, language, and region as well as possibly others depending on what you need.

The relationships between content pieces are what allow you to provide alternate content if the content requested isn’t available in the user’s chosen language. For example: Canadian users may prefer content in Canadian French, and then default to French, with the third choice being English. The same may be true for Spanish for Spain, then US Spanish, and finally English. The goal is to be able to serve something acceptable if the user’s first choice of language isn’t available.

The last key component to delivering multi-lingual content is workflow. When it comes to workflow, the process for creating content is just as important as the process of getting it into users’ hands. Make sure that your KB solution can batch and send files to a third party for translation, or that the workflow can accommodate your internal translation workflow requirements. Some KM applications can connect directly to machine translation tools for quick-and-dirty translations of non-essential information.

KM applications have a lot of features and translation is just one consideration when purchasing or upgrading your KM solution. Internationalization, extensible metadata, the ability to relate content pieces, and flexible workflows all contribute to easier management and localization of multilingual content.

About the Author

Michael Rosenblatt is an Enterprise Solution Director for Lionbridge Technologies. He is responsible for helping companies adapt existing processes and technology to deliver globalization solutions that meet specific goals. Lionbridge Technologies provides complete multicultural content creation, content management, and localization services for the Global 1000. You can reach Michael at Michael_rosenblatt@lionbridge.com.