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<Paper uid="W04-1401">
  <Title>Corporate Language Resources in Multilingual Content Creation, Maintenance and Leverage</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="4" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Corporations willing to go multilingual face two main difficulties, especially at the beginning.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The first one is that many organisations are not acquainted with the processes behind internationalising their many products, documents, web pages and database interfaces effectively, so they opt to reduce the costs of localisation (and some even do not dare to step in and consequently remain monolingual). The second problem, which may derive from problem number one, relates to the fact that the corporation is then likely to end up hiring the wrong translation team or language service vendor after promising a top quality product  quickly and inexpensively.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Unfortunately, qualified and truly skilled candidates for posts in translation, localisation, internationalisation, and language-related project management are very difficult to find. Despite the growing competition among language service  Translation (any form thereof, human, machine, technical, scientific, commercial, written, oral, etc.) involves both process and product. One should not put under scrutiny just the latter and ignore the former. vendors and providers, the language industry is relatively immature. It is composed of young language service companies that are highly project-driven. The lessons learned in one project may be left behind and are often not assembled in a baseline knowledge solution to be retrieved and leveraged later.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The fact that most companies, regardless of whether they outsource  their translation jobs or have their own inhouse language service department, pay little attention to the integration, reusability of and interaction with language resources for translation (LR4Trans) within a project, let alone from project to project, constitutes a less than desirable panorama for the creation of corporate multilingual content.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> So far, the leverage of LR4Trans has been limited to translation memory systems, where previously translated content is available to the translator through a software tool. This technology is not by any means new or highly sophisticated. While insufficient attention has been given to the integration of translation memories with other language resources and technologies  in the workflow, modes of accessing translation memory databases have evolved from purely standalone to distributed data, either synchronised with a central database or as a remotely  accessed central database.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5">  Since the 1980s and 1990s, outsourcing of translation, as of many highly specialised business processes, has become prevalent. In an attempt to lower translation-mediated communication costs, most activities, even the application of translation memory tools, are managed outside the boundaries of the corporate firewall.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6">  A good start for this, though, are Bruckner &amp; Plitt 2001 and Mugge 2001.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7">  This is the typical situation when outsourcing, whereby the content moves out of the source language As a result, translation memories have gradually become widely adopted and almost the indispensable tool of the trade. Commercial producers of translation memory packages claim that, if properly used and maintained, they are valuable corporate knowledge resources.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> The question is whether translation memories constitute the only possible corporate language resource containing corporate knowledge, or whether there can be other components, agents and processes that play an important role in multilingual content as well.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> In the next section we would like to carefully examine the notion of knowledge in connection with those of LR4Trans and multilingual content.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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