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Part IV ✦ Designing a CMS
implement logical rules for the use of the content. In a collection, for example, you can
tag each example with the localities that it’s useful for. You can develop alternative
examples for your other localities.
✦ Management: How do you store and administer content in such a way that people can
find, access, and most easily use it? In localization, the point is to deliver content to
the localization team as efficiently as possible. Doing so may mean delivering only the
examples that need translating to a particular language because you’re tagging them
for the locality that uses that language. In the wider content-management world, of
course, management is responsible for delivering content to wherever it needs to go.
✦ Publishing: How do you ensure that the right content gets into the right publication in
the right locations? In localization, this task is a matter of selecting the localized version
of the content. You may, for example, want to make your CMS select and display only
examples that you tag for the locality of the current user. In content management in
general, of course, this concept is the central purpose of the entire publishing system.
Localization can come into play in any or all portions of your CMS design. Thus I leave the
detailed discussion of localization analysis and design to the specific applicable sections
throughout this book. I leave this section with the following two general principles of content
management that apply especially well to localization, and I offer them as general guides to
localization:
✦ Conservation of work: A CMS doesn’t reduce the amount of work that publishing
content takes; it merely shifts the burden of that work from a human to a computer.
In localization, you want to adopt the attitude that your job is to put as much of the
work as possible onto the CMS. You can, however, only shift it so far. If you want con-
tent that’s useful to people, you can’t escape that fact that people must do a core of
the work.
✦ Balance of generality: The more general that you make your content, the easier it is to
reuse. The more general it is, however, the less it communicates. You must balance a
CMS between the constraints of reusability and strong communication. Similarly, you
must balance the need to communicate at all with your key localities with your need to
communicate well with your primary locality. Whenever I say, “on the fly,” I tip the bal-
ance a bit toward my primary locality to give them deeper and wider understanding at
the expense of other localities that may get less understanding.
For a view of how localization fits into the larger CM picture, see Chapter 39, “Building
Management Systems,” in the section “Localization System.”
An Example Audience Set
As in all logical design examples that I provide, I use the nonprofit organization PLAN
International as my semi-hypothetical example organization. For the sake of illustration, I
assume that PLAN came up with the following set of key audiences (in order of priority) in
their requirements-gathering process:
✦ Members: This audience consists of all those who join PLAN and pay a monthly fee to
support a child and a community somewhere in the world.
✦ In-country staff: This audience consists of all those who reside in diverse locations
around the world and need to know what’s happening in the organization.
Cross-
Reference
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