The south of France is not the first location that comes to mind when one thinks of the translation and localization industry, but one company is drawing attention to this part of the world. Founded in 1994, WH&P offers its clients solutions for content creation and management services, from technical writing to localization, including content management administration to internationalization consultancy. Günther Höser, co-founder of WH&P, shared his thoughts on the company and the localization industry with MultiLingual Computing & Technology. Along with Günther, Irene Koppenaal, localization manager, and Graham Moller, technical director, participated in the interview with Jim Healey.

European-based language technology and services company puts flexibility at the core of working with clients.

Günther Höser, upper left, and the WH&P staff

Tell us something about Sophia Antipolis, home of WH&P.
Günther: Sophia Antipolis, a technology park with about 2,500 high-tech companies, is in the geographical center of Europe — in the south of France near the town of Nice. The park is also called "Telecom Valley" because of the great number of telecommunications, pharmaceutical and medical research, small software and Internet application development companies. Many companies come to Sophia Antipolis because it is a place in Europe where you have it all: the mountains, the Mediterranean and perfect weather year-round. So, companies put their development or training departments here, and some have even concentrated their localization efforts here as well.

Who were the founders of WH&P?
Günther: Michael Wegwitz and I founded WH&P in 1994. Michael, still a financial partner, has not played any active role in WH&P since 2000. We founded WH&P to provide translation services to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which at that time had probably the largest localization department worldwide and was one of the biggest IT companies as well.

How did WH&P develop localization skills in Japanese?
Günther: Our breakthrough in Asian languages occurred with DEC. At that time, producing Japanese documentation was extremely tedious with multiple conversions from Japanese environments, via Macintosh and finally PostScript. WH&P was among the first companies in Europe to use Japanese MS Windows when it came fresh on the market. We went to Japan, set up a group of first-class translators, equipped them with PCs and trained them to use the Windows environment which was totally new to them. They worked in NEC, Toshiba and other Japanese-only environments, and translations were cut and pasted into US files via Macintosh text documents.

We started producing Japanese documents by overwriting the English text in J-Windows, just like any other language. This allowed us to produce the documentation 4-6 times faster than others did previously. We have beaten several records, such as 6 weeks' turnaround for the simultaneous shipment of a full hardware documentation set into 12 languages including Japanese. This occurred in May 1996.

Since that time, has WH&P moved into other Asian languages?
Günther: DEC also asked us to localize into Korean and Chinese, but Japanese was our main language for the first two years, even more so than French or German.

What does flexibility mean when working with a client?
Irene: It's a very important aspect of WH&P project management. It applies to our translators as well. Schedules that clients send us for the localization of their projects are frequently unrealistic. For example, a client may give you a very reasonable three-month time frame for the project, but may finally deliver the sources several weeks later than planned, thereby delaying it from week to week. But the release date won't change. You have to adapt your planning continuously. You have to make sure, in the meantime, that your translators stay available but also have something to do. So, this also makes demands on the flexibility of your planning. And there are many last-minute changes. You need to have a lot of flexibility to get them done in the timeframe. I think that flexibility is the key word in localization.

 

What makes WH&P different from other localization companies?
Irene: In the localization business you have the triangle of quality, time-to-market and cost-efficiency which are three aspects which all clients stress. Like many others, we always try to keep all three aspects of this triangle in balance. But what really makes us different is the consistency of our service: we do on a constant basis what others may achieve sometimes.
Another important aspect is that we extend quality further than other companies do: we create a high-quality working environment. We nurse and constantly improve our relations with clients and contractors. Also, we think people who love their jobs and are given the possibility to do them well produce a lot more and better. The workplace environment is important. We give our employees the possibility to relax. For example, WH&P has a t'ai chi ch'uan teacher coming every week for employees. I think that this is something that really makes us different, and this is something that only can happen in a medium-sized company.

   
                T'ai chi ch'uan is a weekly relaxation event for WH&P employees

Graham, from a technical director's point-of-view, what makes WH&P unique?
Graham: By localization industry standards we are a medium-sized company. We don't have the clout in terms of technology as the larger vendors who try to push or force their technology upon the clients. We favor Open Source and customized solutions that adapt to our clients' processes. This is part of our flexibility. The technology is basically dictated by the client, but we adapt our process. I think many of our clients appreciate this as well — that we are flexible enough to modify our work and methodology to integrate our client's work and processes as well instead of us trying to dictate our work and processes upon the client.

Günther: Another important aspect is that we are just the right size. If we were smaller, we would not be able to do the same work for the same type of clients. If we were bigger, we would be far less profitable and thus be forced to overload our employees and contractors, as it happens in larger organizations. We always get back to the time-costs-quality relation: being at the very end of the production line, we have the highest time pressure. If you add the constantly increasing price pressure, it necessarily impacts the last factor: quality. WH&P is still small enough to let us enjoy the luxury of quality at all levels.

So, there are certain advantages to being a medium-sized enterprise?
Irene: Many! With medium-sized vendors there is also a fast decision-making process. The project managers have direct contact with the managers at the client side. So, if your client rings and asks if you can possibly do this for him or her immediately, then we can decide on the spot to do it. We don't have to go through several channels to get approval from the higher management to do something.

When did WH&P switch from a small enterprise to a medium-sized enterprise?
Günther: We had immediate success due to our unconventional proactive approach. I already explained our revolution with Japanese translators, and with other similar operations we became quickly known to be among, if not the first, SME MLSP (small/medium enterprise multilingual localization service provider), competing with huge multinational corporations on a very competitive market.

If a mouse competes with dinosaurs and manages to take over substantial market shares and supplants major LSPs in direct competition, there is a good chance that the mouse has convincing advantages. Our overhead is very small compared to large multinationals, which makes our prices more competitive. But we also work faster. These last few years the emphasis is by far on time-to-market, more than on cost or quality, and we offer quicker and better services than large LSPs.

Irene already explained the human aspects, such as dedication and personal investment in work, which are very important aspects. But our proactive and unconventional approach is certainly the key factor of our success. Our main concerns are technology and process. As a small company we have little influence on new technology choices. Also, language technology has become stuck; there are no major improvements these last years and no earthquake for more than two decades.

The best technology is worthless without adequate procedures. We use information technology to improve content creation and management process, combined with a high degree of flexibility and an unconventional insight. Each client's needs are different. To optimize the process, you have to take all aspects of your client's environment into account, from production procedures up to the social and political relationships in the company. You have to adapt, talk to the right people and keep a critical eye. We always try to make life easy for all players involved, keeping the burden at the lowest possible level, for our clients, our employees and our contractors as well.

For a good example, look at content management system (CMS) frameworks. Most large corporations offering CMS-based solutions for multilingual content make a substantial error: they "want their cake and eat it, too." They lock their clients into proprietary systems that in the end seldom work for all their clients' needs. It becomes a heavy burden in every sense of the word — the very opposite of our approach: we work on Open Source solutions, so we are far more flexible and adaptable to our clients' daily needs.

Will WH&P continue to remain a medium-sized enterprise?
Günther: In this type of economy we are forced to grow. I truly see profound changes in this market for the years to come. Localization will not go on as it presently does. Twenty years ago there was a dream that computers could do translation, and ten years ago there was an excellent jump forward with tools such as TRADOS, IBM/TM and other translation management tools. But we are a bit stuck now. We know that there will probably always be a need for human translators, which means there is a limit to productivity in language technology.

While we got stuck, there was a lot happening upstream. In localization we already knew that if further improvement can come, it can only come upstream — from the development and authoring side because they design and write the content. For example, by putting text in code, by using concatenated strings or by not respecting basic writing rules, they set limits to productivity. But today, upstream, there is something happening. There are single-sourcing tools and CMS. This will dramatically change our business. And this is something that WH&P is already adapting to.

Irene, what are some of the key challenges when working with a client?
Irene: One thing that I would recommend to any client is to get your localization partner involved in the localization process from the moment you start developing the system — and, if possible, even before that. This is where the consulting function of a company like WH&P comes into focus.

What have you seen as major changes in the localization industry in recent years?
Irene: I think that time-to-market is getting shorter and shorter. Even though I have been working with WH&P since 1996, I have been in the localization industry since 1986. That was the time when a product release could take a year or more. I have definitely seen changes in that respect. Schedules are getting tighter and tighter every year.

Graham, as a technical director, how do you see WH&P addressing what Irene has been saying about time-to-market getting shorter?
Graham: Basically, what we are currently trying to do is to have a little more control on the upstream development and to give more consultancy to our clients in the early stages. We tell them that if they do implement software development with externalized strings and if documentation is written in a manner for localization, not only does it cost less money, but the product can come to market a lot quicker. With processes such as CMS there is even the possibility to go through a process of simultaneous translation with the creation of source material which would give reality, if the process is well managed, to the dream of real simultaneous shipment.

So, our direction is to look very much into CMS with our clients to see how we can develop a workflow mechanism that can have a sign-off procedure during the content creation. The software engineers actually release portions of the products developed to localization during the creation process. Currently, the IT market is short on budget, and money is a bit of a problem. So, many companies have stopped looking at ways to actually and efficiently produce software. They are just pushing out code and documents at the moment to maintain their place in the market.

Could you briefly explain what IPM is and what makes it unique?
Graham: IPM is an internal project management workflow tool. When we looked at the efficiencies of our internal staff, we noted that an awful lot of time was being spent generating quotes, purchase orders and other administration tasks. So, we decided to look at the entire process of how we handle projects internally. Finally, we created an Intranet-based workflow so that each of the team players — whether it be a project manager, engineer or DTP person — works on the same production line. Behind the workflow is a central database.

What would be an underlying philosophy which WH&P has when working with clients in the field of localization?
Irene: We try to be intelligent about the project, so we try and think what is the best way for the client and for us to handle the project — which comes down to the consultancy aspect of our work. Clients know that when they send us their localization projects, we try to find out the best way to handle these projects — not just throw them into the translation mechanism and then throw them back to the client. We try to continually improve the procedures on the client side as well if improvement is needed.

Günther: If you are in a localization company and you get large amounts of material to be localized, you can just do the job, do what you have been asked. In that case, you may end up by delivering poor quality, mostly because the time pressure is far too high and the production cycle is getting shorter and shorter. Each time you manage delivery in time it will shorten next time. And the budgets are getting smaller and smaller as well. Here at WH&P we try to get a good process in place for all our clients and improve whatever can be improved, at the client's end and at our end. So, we really analyze how the client works, how the process works at both ends and what we can do to improve the process.

Graham, as a technical director, what sort of challenges do you see ahead in the localization industry?
Graham: There are three things which all clients are interested in: cost-efficiency, quality and time-to-market. What we have to concentrate on is to maintain quality. We have to retain quality translation, to make it more cost-efficient and to bring it to market quicker. We already have a high quality in the localization industry here at WH&P. So, the two factors that we can improve on are cost-efficiency and time-to-market. We are a multilingual agency that handles any number of languages — up to the number of languages that Microsoft supports. We feel that sometimes the translators already are working at a level of cost which is difficult to actually play with, so we come back to time-to-market.

Our concentration is to bring the products to market a little bit quicker. This comes down to process — the efficiency of internal and external processes. This is the reason to come back to IPM, the reason why we invested and implemented our own project management workflow mechanism because we looked around on the market and didn't find anything that really met the needs of the localization industry. So, we decided to build our own tool, and we are trying to plug into IPM as many of the processes as possible. 

Günther, where do you see WH&P in the future, let's say in five years?
Günther: I said earlier that in this economy we are "condemned" to grow. For us at WH&P, growth is more a consequence, not a target in itself. The bigger a company, the smaller are the proportional benefits — until there are no benefits left at all. It is easy to calculate that WH&P will start losing money when we grow above the level of 100 employees, unless we raise our prices above the limit. We'll need to add office space, medium and upper range managers, a sales organization, a large financial and administration department and so on. Our clients certainly don't want to pay for all these people. None of them will actually produce benefit; in fact, they'll rather eat it up. It's a well known fact, in our industry with the high price pressure, all large LSPs lose money with localization.

We are looking into alternative decentralized solutions to stay small and rather create a new company when we approach the zero profit limits. Each company would stay independent. They would even compete in certain ways, but cooperate on larger projects and even share central services like sales and administration. By the way, it's becoming fashionable again. A few Japanese multinationals have tried the same experience and decentralized by cutting some of their companies into smaller units. It seems that in localization we're a bit behind. We still have these large LSPs swallowing all competitors that come into their range.

Where will WH&P be in five years? Hard to say. There is no visibility in this industry, at least not farther ahead than two years. First of all, I think WH&P will still exist. We cultivate flexibility; we stay ahead of technology; we have very solid clients; we have an excellent team of highly experienced specialists; and we have no intention to get swallowed.

But you will probably not recognize us — nor will you recognize most localization companies you see today. Our business is dramatically changing. Today's localization companies' core businesses are project management, localization engineering and QA. Most of these occupations will be redundant or automated, replaced by completely integrated solutions, including everything from content creation, to localization and content management, connected through efficient workflow systems. That will happen in less than five years.

We anticipate the move. Until recently, our content creation offer was still limited and more of a complementary on-demand service provided to existing clients. With our integrated CMS workflow solutions, content creation is now becoming another spoke in the wheel.

Whatever the evolution will be, it will always be an important trump card to have a reliable network of first-class writers, engineers and translators who will be linked to our workflow system. Localization experts will extend their field to become content management experts and move into consultancy. That will probably be our future in five years: complete content creation and management solutions with consultancy services.

So, let's meet again in five years. Is it OK for you?