The Gilbane Group

The Gilbane Group Inc. is an analyst and consulting firm focused on content technologies and their application to high-value business solutions.

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The Group's industry analysts and consultants aim to provide the most accurate and unbiased information available to IT strategists, managers, and investors from all types of organisations. Readers include vertical industries in 80+ countries, financial analysts, market analysts/researchers, VCs, consultants, integrators, vendors, academics, PR firms, and journalists.

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Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative

In July 2008 the Gilbane Group did a research on multilingual communications and provided an answer to the important question: “Why do organisations need to optimise the global content value chain?”

Download this Gilbane research report ( pdf 2578.9 KB)

According to Karl Kadie, contributing analyst with Gilbane Group , companies acknowledge multilingual communications as an important success factor in corporate business initiatives, but most respondents believe that current efforts are falling short . Buyers in countries large and small are increasingly demanding local-language material as a condition for purchasing products and services. Laggards that deliver multilingual marketing communication late to regional markets lose market share in key geographies and see their global brand fragment and decline in value.

Despite trends toward local-language information as a factor for enhanced customer experience, and competitive advantage, content globalisation continues to be relegated to the final stage of product delivery. Although many organisations are currently producing content in a wide range of languages, conversations about improving processes and technologies have yet to rise from the departmental and regional level to an enterprise discussion.

With its unique position in the localisation market, SDL Tridion offers proven technology in a strong translation solution that fulfill the urgent needs for multilingual communication in a well managed process.

Study highlights

Based on in-depth interviews with mid-level and senior management, this study finds:

Major gaps between corporate goals for global expansion and the actions taken to achieve them
Challenges in achieving a balance between centralised and regional operations and the consequences of ignoring this dilemma
A lack of integration and interoperability across authoring, content management, localisation/translation, and publishing components
The emergence of formal, organised strategies for addressing these issues, driven by the mandate to improve multilingual communications delivery to support corporate globalisation goals.

This study is intended to shed light on the current state of content globalisation and the challenges facing companies who are impacted by new business mandates for improved multilingual communications. Localisation and translation processes are part of an enterprise content management strategy. This report investigates practices from two different perspectives: from that of the content management professional, and that of the language professional.

Download this Gilbane research report ( pdf 2578.9 KB)