By Ferose VR, SVP and Head of Globalization Services, SAP

Many giving people follow one simple mantra: ‘Give more than you can take and do more than you speak.’

But the narrative around giving has been uni-dimensional, centered mainly on philanthropy. Actually, ‘giving’ is an idea mentioned in most religious scriptures. Author Sanjay Agarwal’s Daan and Other Giving Traditions in India explores the ‘giving’ traditions of major religious groups in India — Hinduism, Islam and Christianity.

While reading the numerous narratives around giving, one question has intrigued me: can one break down the DNA of a giver? Having met many amazing givers, I believe the following attributes spur their actions:

Giving is contextual: When a beggar in Kerala donated Rs 84 (a dollar equivalent) — his entire wealth — to the Chief Minister’s Flood Relief Fund, he gave up everything he had. How do you compare that with Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg giving away a portion of their wealth (in billions of dollars)? Can it even be compared? Giving is not only about how much you give but also about how much you are willing to give up.

Long-term vs short-term impact: How does an act of giving ripple out? What is its afterlife, its half-life period? Imagine you need money to pay your college fees or else you’d have to drop out. Help arriving at that moment will change your whole life. An act of giving with a long-term impact has a greater half-life.

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VR Ferose , Barney Pell and Lorien Pratt

Today, with even the smallest enterprise potentially serving a global client base, the need to communicate across languages and cultures is growing rapidly. However, cross-context communication is hard and costly. Unless great care is taken, many things can be lost in translation due to translation errors and/or differing interpretations of even correctly translated communications.

The costs of translation failures are often more than just financial. Miscommunication can lead to loss of reputation, legal exposure, physical harm, or even industrial disasters. For this reason, clear, accurate and effective communication – between cultures, languages, disciplines, and industries – is an increasing priority.

In response, many companies spend significant resources to ensure communication within their networks of agents, partners, customers, and government agencies. This need to accurately share information between and among diverse trading partners has evolved into the business function called localization.

Localization is defined as technologies and processes that adapt products and services for use in and by specific countries, regions, or groups. It is often a highly complex and expensive process that includes translating text and audio material, modifying documents and software to reflect localized conventions (such as how decimal points and dates are represented), and continually analyzing and incorporating into products and services the regulatory, compliance, and tax requirements of specific countries, states, and cities.

This article focuses on one specific function within the broader localization picture: translation. Across businesses worldwide, there is an increasing demand for translation, driven by:

·         an increase in demand for non-English languages,

·         increase in products and services from non-English countries reaching foreign markets,

·         an in vertical-specific translation use cases, and

·         a reduction of translation, driven by improvements in AI technology and the rise of cloud-based translation platforms. These lower costs support a growing “long tail” of businesses that can profitably offer services in multiple languages.

This article discusses this new future, in which there is an increased demand and opportunity for translation. We also cover nuances that your organization needs to keep in mind to succeed in this changing market.

Translation services at a turning point

Annual enterprise spending on translation services is expected to grow to US$45 billion by 2020, primarily driven by increasing globalization and an increasing amount of text being generated worldwide.

This growth is also being stimulated by new technology. Many organizations are using artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of machine translation (MT) to reduce the costs of ...

In the area of online translation projects, project managers at SAP Language Services have harmonized different email templates used for translation project announcements and kick-offs. The changes are the following:

• The email subject now first lists the translation type (documentation / support package), followed by the information "Translation Start"/"Final worklist available" and the like.


• The email body does not contain any tables any longer, in order to allow translation agencies who use plain text and macros to smoothly handle our emails. All relevant information can still be found in the email subject and on the project page (e.g. project name, project ID, system, client, relevant languages)


• All deadlines are now pulled automatically from our project database so that date formats should be the same in all cases.

We hope that this facilitates the effort on your side.