Last Thursday we had the third webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter", where customer Sean Mattson from HDS and Rob Vandenberg from Oracle Partner Lingotek shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Hitachi Data System’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers.

In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.  

Sean Mattson, Hitachi Data Systems 

Q: Did you run into any issues in the deployment of the platform?
A: There were some challenges, we were one of the first enterprise ‘on premise’ installations for Lingotek and our WebCenter platform also has a lot of custom features.  There were a lot of iterations and back and forth working with Lingotek at first.  We both helped each other, learned a lot and in the end managed to resolve all issues and roll out a very compelling solution for HDS.

Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?
A: Being able to manage and govern the content lifecycle globally and centrally and at the same time enabling the field to update, review and publish the incremental content changes without a lot of touchpoints has helped us streamline and simplify the entire publishing process.

Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?
A: I wouldn't say resistance as much as skepticism that we could actually deploy an automated and self publishing solution.  Even if a solution is great, adoption of a new process can be a challenge and we are still pursuing our adoption targets.  One of the most important aspects is to include lots of training and support materials and offer as much helpdesk type support as needed to get the field self sufficient and confident in the capabilities of the system. 

Rob Vandenberg, Lingotek 

Q: Are there any limitations regarding supported languages such as support for French Canadian and Indian languages?
A: Lingotek supports all language pairs. Including right to left languages and double byte languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean

Q: Is the Lingotek solution integrated with the new 11g release of WebCenter Sites? 
A: Yes! In fact, Lingotek is the first OVI partner for Oracle WebCenter Sites 

Q: Can translation memories help to improve the accuracy of machine translation?
A: One of the greatest long term strategic benefits of using Lingotek is the accumulation of translation memories, or past human translations. These TMs can be used to "train" statistical machine translation engines to have higher and higher quality. This virtuous cycle is ongoing and will consistently improve both machine and human translations. 

Q: We have existing translation memories from previous work with our translation service provider. Can they be easily imported in to the Lingotek solution for re-use? 
Q: Yes, Lingotek is standards compliant. We support TM import in both the TMX and XLIFF formats.

Q: If we use Lingotek as a service to do our professional translation and also use the Lingotek software solution, do we get the translation memories to give us a means of just translating future adds and changes ourselves? 
A: Yes, all the data is yours, always. Lingotek can provide both the integrated translation software as well as the professional translation services. All the content and translation memories are yours.

Q: Can you give us an example of where community translation has proved to be successful?
A: The key word here is community. If you have a community that cares about you, your content, and the rest of the community, then community translation can work for you. We've seen effective use cases in Product User Groups content, Support Communities, and other types of User Generated content, like wikis and blogs.