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Tag: Single sourcing

Content operations Localization Podcast Podcast transcript

Conquering content localization: strategies for success (podcast)

Translation troubles? This podcast is for you! In episode 173 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Mike McDermott, Director of Language Services at MadTranslations, share strategies for overcoming common content localization challenges and unlocking new market opportunities.

Mike McDermott: It gets very cumbersome to continually do these manual steps to get to a translation update. Once the authoring is done, ideally you just send it right through translation and the process starts.

Bill Swallow: So from an agile point of view, I am assuming that you’re talking about not necessarily translating an entire publication from page one to page 300, but you’re saying as soon as a particular chunk of content is done and “blessed,” let’s say, by reviewers in the native language, then it can immediately go off to translation even if other portions are still in progress.

Mike McDermott: Exactly. That’s what working in this semantic content and these types of environments will do for a content creator. You don’t need to wait for the final piece of content to be finalized to get things into translation.

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Content operations Content strategy

What does it all mean?! Foundations of an enterprise content strategy

In the wide world of content, we’ve got a lot of terms. Some may be new to you, and others have contested definitions, which makes clear communication—typically our bread and butter—a challenge. If you’re exploring efficiency in your organization’s content processes, this post clarifies the foundational concepts of an enterprise content strategy.

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Content operations Industry insights Podcast Podcast transcript

The challenges of content operations across the enterprise (podcast)

In episode 167 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe, Alan Pringle, and Bill Swallow discuss the difficulties organizations encounter when they try to create a unified content experience for their end users.

AP: Technical content, your tech content or product content, wants to convey knowledge so the user or reader can do whatever thing that they need to do. Learning content is about improving performance. And with your knowledge base content, it’s when, “I need to solve this very specific problem.” So those are the distinctions that I see among those three types.

SO: Okay, and from a customer point of view, what does this mean?

AP: Well, in reality, I don’t think the customers care. They want the information available, and they want it in the formats they want it in. And also, they want the right information so they can either get that thing done, improve their performance, or solve a specific problem.

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Content operations Learning content Podcast Podcast transcript

How reuse eliminates redundant learning content with Chris Hill (podcast)

In episode 164 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest Chris Hill of DCL talk about where you can find redundancy in your learning content, what causes it, and how a single source reuse strategy can eliminate duplication.

You really start to run into trouble when you need to make version two, and you discover a problem with version one. If I’m making some marketing materials, maybe I need to use some information from the engineering team or from the manuals for whatever product I’m marketing. I might just copy that information over and put it into my marketing materials. Then, when we go to produce our training for that particular product, we might say, “Okay, I need that stuff. I’m gonna copy that from wherever I can find it,” which might be from marketing or engineering depending on where I look and who I know better or which repository is easier for me to get to. The problem here is that if anybody has made any edits along the way, they have to ensure that those edits are propagated through all these departments. And that doesn’t always happen. 

— Chris Hill

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Content strategy Podcast Podcast transcript

Brewing a better content strategy through single sourcing (podcast)

In episode 162 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar discuss the benefits of single sourcing as part of your content strategy through the example of two things they love: coffee and beer.

“We know companies that have moved away from a do-it-yourself approach because they had maybe two or three different people putting in half to almost full-time work on the publishing system and not on other facets of the company’s core business or the writing. They were simply there to keep everything working. It just blows my mind that on a scale where you have hundreds of writers contributing content, you are saying, Okay, you three people are going to be solely responsible for keeping this thing up and running so that they can produce their content, rather than having a system that’s designed to keep itself up and running.

— Bill Swallow

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