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Blog - Letter from Europe

Letter from Europe

posted 2007-03-28 12:49:07
by Barry Lloyd

The title is intended to homage that great BBC radio four series “Letter from America”, the worlds longest running speech radio program - presented for many years by the late, great Alistair Cooke (KBE). Each week Alistair would offer a perspective on American life, starting with a small observation he had made in person or from the various news services. He would then typically aim to offer an understanding of this observation by superimposing it on the larger cultural, political, statistical and financial landscape of this great country. This entry is my attempt to offer the same insight, but focusing on the European landscape in order to provide a perspective of our continent, address how the multi-facetted environment here affects globalisation requirements and describe how they should be addressed by globalisation solutions.

On my way to a meeting yesterday it struck me how Europe is in a constant state of flux (to be truthful it had struck me several times before, but this was the first time I’d really thought about it). I was walking through Munich, Bavaria (don’t tell a Bavarian they are in Germany!) – a truly remarkable and beautiful city that I have visited on many occasions and each time I manage to see something new. It is rich in history - from the earliest times when beer-brewing monks settled in the area (Its native name, München, literally means "Monks”), through battles and wars to its more recent history and the opening of many political and physical barriers. Its central architecture is a mix of old and new - baroque sitting next to modern baroque replica, sitting next to stone and glass offices. Further out the city becomes business oriented – with offices, high-tech companies and manufacturers taking advantage of Munich’s central location in Europe. Similarly, Munich’s people are a true mix– you can see veterans sitting in the beer gardens watching the world go by alongside business men eager to get to their next meeting or indeed having their meeting in the beer garden. A great many people now living and working in Munich do not originate from there. In recent years an influx from Russia and Eastern Europe has helped boost both the work force and the Bavarian multicultural experience.

As a solutions engineer working for Idiom in Europe, I spend a lot of time visiting clients, prospects and partners across the continent and the description I have just given of one European city is repeated many times over. From Norway to Spain, Portugal to the Urals - Europe and Europeans exhibit a close mix of traits due to their history. What of the people? Well, they are mixed up too (meant in the geographical sense, of course). Especially in the last decade or so and much like the rest of the world, Europeans have been afforded many advantages: One can now travel to, live and work anywhere one likes and many ‘new’ Europeans are taking advantage of this.

As a result of this ‘European Brownian motion’, wherever you travel, you’ll never be sure which language to address a person with and what the right tone should be, depending on the context (being a Brit, I tend to speak English and if not understood, I say it louder, I’m ashamed to say!). If I were to compare Europe to food (the later being something I like to think about a lot!), I’d say the Europe of just a couple of decades ago was meat and two veg – each type of food has its place on the plate and could be left there if you didn’t enjoy the flavour. Modern Europe is a Paella, or an even better comparison would be to a Mongolian barbeque, where your chosen meets and vegetables are cooked on a hot plate and generally get mixed up with everyone else’s food – so you get to taste the whole menu.

So what has all this got to do with globalisation? I here you ask. The simple answer is that given the backdrop I have just painted, there is more need for good globalisation solutions in Europe than anywhere else in the world. Every market in Europe needs to address both its customers in its own country and those in other countries in numerous languages and similarly take cultural, market, legal and tonal variances into consideration. Nordics would typically buy an MP3 player or dish washer with an English language instruction manual without too much thought, whereas customers from central European countries would prefer local language instructions and are more likely to look for manufacturers offering such. In both cases, manufacturers must take local regulations and legal aspects into consideration and include coverage for both in product information.

Now consider the statistics: Two thirds of a billion people live in Europe (450 million in EU member states), and Europe has a GDP of around 12 trillion USD – similar in size to that of the USA. There are currently 25 European member states and 23 official languages recognized by the EU - plus a number of other languages spoken in various regions. With no common language policy across Europe, multilingual along with multicultural life is positively promoted. All of this adds up to an environment where translation and globalisation solution companies are in constant demand. For example, many regional and central European governmental organisations employ hundreds of translators and are always looking to employ more. And their translation requirements are interesting – not just English to French or English to German, but Romainian to Swedish or Spanish to Czech!

Europe is also a hotspot for language service providers. Idiom deals with many of them – there are literally hundreds of translation agencies from the largest well known names, to smaller companies providing more specialist or vertical translation offerings. They have arisen because of the environment in Europe.

All this keeps Idiom and myself busy! Right now, more organisations with a base in Europe are looking for globalisation solutions than ever before. This is no doubt due to Europe’s open market and open door approach. Most companies I have visited in the last few years are looking for a way to automate as much as possible, reduce cost, improve quality and importantly engage their customers in the way the customer wants – using their language, context and tone. Behind that, they are looking for freedom of choice – being able to select translation services from any partner they wish to work with and implement processes that meet their internal business requirements and externally deliver what the European customer wants. Due to the constant flux we are in, European companies are also looking at the cutting edge of globalisation solutions – deep integration into content repositories and hybrid machine translation / translation memory solutions are becoming interesting in order to deal with the flux in as real-time a way as possible.

Europe is an always changing, expanding mixed up place, full of diversity and surprises wherever you turn. Any globalisation solution has to be flexible, quick to adapt, offer freedom of choice and be able to offer the latest innovative ‘flux-navigating’ technology. Working for the only company on the planet to truly offer such a solution, I’m a happy, but busy chap.

Vive la Différence!

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