DITA ROI: Are translation savings all they seem?

This post is part of a series of posts that question some of the claims made about the benefits of DITA adoption. This post focuses on savings in translation costs.

Articles about DITA ROI make some rather sweeping claims about the money you can save by adopting DITA. One prominent DITA proponent writes, "If you have localization in your workflow, you can probably justify the cost of DITA implementation." I would argue that that claim is false: that most companies that localize their content would never recoup the costs of a full DITA/CMS implementation, and that DITA makes sense mostly in fairly extreme cases such as hardware documentation where there are hundreds of similar versions to be documented.

There are two main claims for translation savings with DITA: topic reuse and post-translation DTP costs.

Topic reuse
First, DITA is supposed to save you money because you can reuse topics. "Write once, use frequently" means that a topic is only translated once. Big savings, right?

Maybe yes, maybe no. Translators use Translation Memory. TM is very sophisticated: each sentence is read into memory, and each sentence is flagged if it is an identical or fuzzy match to a sentence before it. If you repeat a sentence, TM will ensure that it is only translated once.

There is still a cost for processing a 100% match, but it is minimal. Typically, the cost for identical repetitions is 15% to 30% of the cost of new translation.

What this all means is that if currently 10% of your topics are duplicates of other topics, your translation costs are higher by 1.5-3% than if you reused topics.

Note: You can get some additional savings from DITA with a CMS by transforming your ditamaps into an interchange format called XLIFF before sending them to the translator. This is a pretty complicated procedure; have a look a this link to see if your organization can handle it. (And I remian somewhat confused about XLIFF: my friend who runs a large translation company says, "Since our CAT tool can handle XML directly, it’s not necessary to go through the migration process into .xliff format.")

Keep in mind that the savings from topic reuse only apply to topics that you are currently maintaining in duplicate places. If you decide to start reusing other topics in more places, that could arguably improve your quality, but it does not improve your ROI. (Plus, I argued in another post that the reuse following DITA adoption is often actually harmful to reader usability: link)

It is true that translation costs rise for reused text when it gets out of sync - when different locations are updated differently. It is always a good idea before sending things for translation to spend some time preparing the files; syncing duplicate content should be part of that check, when it occurs. But even when translators get different versions of dupes, they charge less for fuzzy matches, so the price is not the same as translating the section twice.

My point here is about ROI, not how to write. I am not arguing that cutting and pasting content is good practice. But for many writing teams there is not so much duplication that there's any problem keeping up with it, and if there is, then there are many other systems that provide excellent mechanisms for reusing topics, including Docbook XML, other forms of XML, and Madcap Flare. An extremely expensive full-blown DITA implementation with a CMS is not the only way to reuse topics - and for many organizations, it is not the best. (More on that in a later post.)

Post-translation DTP costs
DITA is supposed to save you money because in other systems, work has to be done after translation. One prominent DITA proponent claims, "Typically, 30–50 percent of total localization cost in a traditional workflow is for desktop publishing. That is, after the files are translated from English into the target language, there is work to be done to accommodate text expansion and pagination changes."

This is a valid point, except that it doesn't state its assumption that you are using bad practices. When you start to localize your DTP content you should remove manual formatting and rely on styles instead. In addition, you can't use formatting that will cause problems in languages that have longer words or are more verbose. This means: stop adding manual page breaks, stop using format overrides (FrameMaker 10 provides an easy way to find and remove overrides), stop putting section headers in the margin, stop setting manual cell heights in tables, stop using forced line breaks (Shift-Enter).

These practices will hugely reduce the post-translation DTP costs (certainly to way less than the stated 30-50%, although there is still a per-page DTP fee). When we talk about the advantages of DITA, we assume people are using good practices; we shouldn't assume that the alternatives are created with bad practices.

Conclusion
Articles about DITA ROI often give you rules of thumb to use in your calculations. Their claims are almost always based on an unstated assumption that your current authoring environment is the most inefficient one possible, and even then their claims can be over the top. It is prudent to ignore this advice and instead go to your translation vendor to find out what your cost savings might be. I have become friendly with the managing director of a translation vendor I once worked with, and he assures me that translation cost is virtually the same when the source is DITA, Docbook, other forms of XML, Flare's XHTML, HTML, etc.

I have spoken with doc teams who are planning to move from Docbook XML to DITA simply because they are confused by these DITA ROI articles and think that the massive translation savings will apply to them. This is not a trivial issue. DITA proponents should be much more precise in the claims they make about DITA cost savings, and doc departments should be much better educated before jumping on the DITA bandwagon.

Note: I'm uneasy about quoting individuals. It isn't fair to single out any particular DITA proponents on how they justify DITA ROI, as many DITA proponents are saying similar things. In addition, I don't mean to impugn the motivations of anyone.

Update: I have a growing unease about quoting people and then knocking down what they say. I have now removed links to DITA proponents I quote. In later posts, I may even stop quoting.