PLM and Seamless Multi-lingual Collaboration

Global environment is the reality of today’s business. Engineering and manufacturing organizations are located in multiple places worldwide. To help people to collaborate despite lanugage barriers is a very important goal. In the past, multi-language support in software was limited to providing versions of software working in different languages. However, in case of product development and manufacturing the language support cannot be limited only to language localization. These days focus shifts towards something I call “language transparency”.

Language Transparency Tools

Almost a year ago, I posted about some of my ideas related to seamless translation ideas. Navigate to the following link to read this historical blog post and associated comments. In my view, Google Wave, which I used as a primer of possible technology, can provide a kind of language transparency infrastructure. On Demand Translation tools will play an important role in streamlining collaboration in product development and manufacturing organization.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLZnQ2btP98]

Another example is mobile. Navigate your browser to QuestVisual to learn more. This augmented reality like application enables you to provide seamless translations of fragments of texts around you. I found it pretty cool.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OfQdYrHRs]

Multi-lungual PLM: Who Cares?

Few days ago, I’ve seen the announcement coming from Dassault Systems – Dassault Systemes Chooses SDL Translation Management Systems to Provide a Unified Translation Platform. SDL is the outfit focusing on localization and translation. I wonder if DS is planning some cool multi-lingual features to be supported in V6. Collaborative tools like V6 have a potential to work across multiple organizations, divisions and departments. The competition  becomes stronger in PLM world. If you follow announcements you can see few of them such as Daimler decides for NX, Austin Martin decides for NX and BMW decides for V6. All of them shows a very strong competition going between mindshare PLM vendors.

What is my conclusion? Business is going global. To break language barriers becomes an important objective for many software providers. Having technologies that can provide a seamless integration level is extremely powerful, in my view. It can provide a good differentiation feature for global deployment. What is more important is that such type of tools is very people-oriented and can increase a perceived customer value. I’d be interested to learn more about how various PLM tools support multi-lingual collaboration. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Freebie. No vendor paid me to write this blog.