Lessons in Localization: SAP

A lesson by Tucker Johnson.

About SAP

SAP is a German software company specializing in enterprise software that allows to manage business operations and customer relations. SAP is especially known for its ERP software solutions, but offers an entire suite of products to customers around the world. SAP is the largest European software company by revenue and is the world's third-largest publicly-traded software company. Nimdzi talked to Markus Meisl, a member of the management team of SAP's language technology and services department about the company's localization program.

TL;DR

Large internal team: The Language Experience Lab (LX Lab) team consists of over 200 people in 7 locations and rolls up into the Globalization Services engineering department.

Focus on niche vendors: Smaller, in-country single language service providers are used for all languages. There is a strong focus on using vendors that have a very involved senior leadership team and have their primary operations located in the local markets.

Local user groups: In priority markets, there are robust local user groups for SAP products that play a role in providing user experience feedback to the globalization team.

Internally trained MT: Initially, SAP partnered with a third-party vendor to deploy statistical machine translation, allowing them to move quickly. Today they manage and train neural engines in-house, using their large corpus of bilingual data from years of translation memory updates.

Fast figures

Included in this lesson in localization

• Program overview
• Project and process management
• Supply chain
• Quality control
• Technology
• Interesting initiatives

Program overview

Localization, as the world knows the term, is not quite the same as localization at SAP.

From SAP’s early days in the 1970s, they have been localizing. The first customer, Siemens, had requested the product in German and in French to accommodate their teams abroad. Things have not changed since then, and there is still a strong focus on localizing built into the company culture at SAP.

With an exponentially increasing global demand for its products since the early 1990s and numerous acquisitions after 2000,  the volumes and complexity of the localization efforts have continuously increased, even through periods where budgets are being cut, meaning that there is always a strong need for the localization team to be advocating for the budget to support the growing volumes. There are literally thousands of products requiring localization, each with different requirements.

The localization team at SAP supports the translation of over 1 billion (source) words each year. About 90 percent of these words are processed via the TMs and MT, so may not have seen a translator more than once.

Culture

As stated above, localization, as the world knows the term, is not quite the same as localization at SAP. In the SAP world, localization has a much broader meaning than translation and related services and includes the adaptation of the company’s software products for local legal requirements and business processes. In other words: Globalization Services delivers country versions of the standard software that is built for the US and German markets.

The Language Experience Lab (LX Lab), which is in charge of all localization-related activities designed to shape the language experience of SAP’s customers, manages a lot of activities and technologies in house, and they have a firm strategy of using single language vendors for each language. This is a model that may not work for other companies, but it fits the needs of SAP regarding cost, quality, and time.

Localization teams are set up somewhat like Scrum teams and there is a strong “Agile Development” culture. The majority of HR line teams within LX Lab consists of 20-40 team members and is structured so that there are people managers who can focus on team management, while individual service owners focus on the services provided and product managers and product owners focus on the products and tools that are developed in the engineering team.

Organization

Within the Globalization Services engineering unit, the LX Lab is a specialized team of over 200 people responsible for localizing SAP’s software and non-coded assets such as documentation or training or marketing materials into up to 75 languages for the worldwide market. LX Lab focuses on traditional localization services and also develops their own tools, managing machine translation, artificial intelligence, and other initiatives.

There are separate teams to manage various functions required for the overall localization program. The LX Engineering team looks after tooling, automation, and the comprehensive technical infrastructure. The Business Partner Management team manages the supply chain. The various Service teams represent the core of what they do and manage the diverse localization requests.

SAP team locations. Source: SAP

While the localization efforts are centralized into the LX Lab team, team members themselves are spread across time zones in seven separate offices, including Vancouver, Bangalore, Shanghai, Galway, Walldorf, São Leopoldo, and Tokyo. Each location has developed because of a strong need to be local. As SAP grows in each market, the local offices grow accordingly.

Languages

In cases of acquisitions made by SAP, some organizations support different languages than existing SAP products, which means the number of languages depends on which product is being localized. For example, with one of SAP’s most recent acquisitions, there was a need to support one specific part of a product into 75 languages. Other products have different extents of languages. SAP’s flagship product is of course their ERP solution, S/4HANA, which is localized into ~40 languages.

SAP is very cognizant of the fact that once new languages are added, it is very difficult to stop them, as local customers have come to expect localized versions. Once a language is supported for a given product, it will most likely continue to be supported indefinitely. For this reason, product teams have to be very careful in selecting each language, as they know that once they ship a product in a certain language, they will most likely be shipping it until the end of time (or until the product is retired).

Project and process management

SAP develops business process management software, so it should be no surprise that most of the work being done by the localization team is being done largely on internally developed systems. As many of SAP’s core products such as S/4HANA are primarily based on their proprietary ABAP technology, they continue to use the corresponding translation environment SE63. Additionally, they are using third-party software.

There are dozens of different internal teams that request localization through the LX Lab team. While the team includes support services like engineering and vendor management, they are essentially a centralized project management organization, funneling requests from multiple stakeholders through the tools to dozens of single-language vendors that perform the translation.

Because of the diverse (and large) set of stakeholders, localization managers need to be very organized. Some products ship daily, whereas others ship on a weekly basis. Each product has its own extent of languages. Each internal team has their own unique way of working, and the project management team needs to adapt to each. Whatever cannot be managed through technology falls on the project management teams.

Supply chain

A team of vendor managers manages separate single-language service providers for each language. Typically, all work is outsourced to the vendors, with only a few in-house resources for the priority languages German and English (German, since they have a strong German customer base).

SAP has chosen a strategy to only work with single-language vendors with in-country operations. There are a few multiple-language service providers in the supply chain, but these are typically used for specific target languages. When choosing a vendor, an emphasis is placed on local presence (in-country operations) for each market, and strong involvement from senior management of each vendor company.

Highlight: Annual vendor conferences

2020 is the first year that SAP is not hosting a vendor conference, which is due to the worldwide restrictions associated with COVID-19. In normal years, there is an annual conference or a series of separate vendor conferences in different markets. These meetings help to build stronger relationships with each vendor and share knowledge and best practices across teams. In addition to these conferences, SAP hosts a regular Supplier Advisory Board, which includes representatives from their supply chain that can advise and provide feedback on any changes happening to the overall localization processes or technology at SAP.

Other considerations when choosing a new vendor are price and feedback from the project managers. SAP uses surveys and feedback channels to collect data on how satisfied the project management team is with each vendor. Generally, feedback is positive. It is rare that they have to replace any vendor, and this is a step that is reserved for cases where the same issues are being reported repeatedly after multiple attempts to improve.

The most frequent challenges they have with the supply chain are with low-volume languages. SAP has an expectation that each agency should have qualified translators, who are familiar with the translation environment and with the individual products. Each vendor has one or more “super users” who are very familiar with the SAP localization technology and processes.

Quality control

SAP expects a lot from the agencies they work with. There are a lot of quality steps required from them before the translator clicks the “back to SAP” button and submits the translations. Since they have been hosting their translation environment for decades, they have had a lot of opportunity over the years to build in checks and analytics so that the central localization managers have full visibility into who is touching what files and making which changes, which allows them to maintain a level of control over the linguistic tasks being performed by the supply chain.

There are internal quality checks, as well. For marketing content, there is an in-country market review process. For software localization, some technical checks may be performed for complex non-Latin languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, or Hindi on localized builds. The focus, in particular for new products, is on language acceptance tests, which are based on test cases provided by the product team. Testers in the local markets, as well as linguists at the respective localization agencies manage this process and are tasked with fixing all language issues before each shipment.

There are also very strong local user groups in some key countries that report issues. This feedback, combined with feedback from regular users, is constantly reviewed by the localization team. With feedback from primary markets being prioritized.

Technology

SAP was one of the very first Trados customers. Being early adopters, they have been in a position over the years to influence the features of the tool and have become very integrated with their current Trados-based solution. An integration between SE63, SAP’s proprietary translation environment, basically serves as a “wrapper” over Trados to help them integrate the systems that they are using. This unique TMS/CAT solution has helped to increase efficiency internally, though it has added some difficulties finding and training translators who are able to work within this special technology.

On top of the SAP/Trados TMS/CAT solution, SAP uses an internally developed terminology solution called simply SAPterm, which is available as a public online resource. These glossaries have been managed and updated for years and currently boast thousands of terms.

The LX Lab development team has designed and developed their own middleware, Translation Enablement Workbench, which automates the data exchange between development repositories such as Github, and the LX Lab translation systems.

In addition to Trados, SAP also works in Smartling to handle marketing content. This tool was selected specifically for marketing content because of the in-context features offered. The teams at SAP are always looking for new tools and processes that will provide more context to the translators and reviewers during translation and are currently exploring new avenues with XTM.

Given that SAP develops software for other companies, it is perhaps not unsurprising that there are ongoing conversations about building a proprietary cloud-based language platform, which could serve as a solution for internal project managers (LX Lab), external team members (translators, LSPs), and possibly even customers in the future. As of the time of publishing, there is no such development in place, even as SAP continues to evaluate their existing language technology stack.

While evaluating third-party cloud-based TMS systems, they are placing a strong focus on interoperability, AI features (including MT), and integrations. Out-of-box connectors, access to MT options, in-context review features, and flexibility are all priorities for SAP when choosing a technology.

Machine translation

Internal departments are always expressing a desire for translation into more and more languages, so there is a strong internal demand for machine translation to process the high volumes from the product, marketing, and education teams.

Having been an early adopter of rules-based machine translation, SAP decided several years ago to switch to statistical machine translation and hired a small team of experts. An external vendor supported them with the infrastructure, because they wanted to build momentum around rolling out MT but were not quite ready to manage it in-house right away.

Today, SAP has been working with NMT for the last 2-3 years, which is set up and managed internally. Extensive translation memories were used to help train the engines. After the engines were trained, SAP NMT engine quality was compared to major brand engines and found to be superior for SAP domain translations. While public MT solutions may still provide better output for very general texts, SAP has a very specific terminology and style, which is what necessitates the internal management of the MT engine training.

The decision of whether to provide post-editing or not depends on the use case and the related quality requirements. For some cases, the team is investigating posting raw MT wherever it would not risk potential legal or regulatory issues.

Overall, SAP has a robust language automation program. 90 percent of the content that flows through the LX Lab team is completely translated by the TMS and MT, never even being touched by a translator.

Interesting initiatives

There is a lot going on at SAP. Here are some interesting initiatives in the works at the time of this publication.

Language platform evaluation

As we already reported, SAP was one of the very first customers of Trados, and they continue to use it today, albeit with plenty of integrations built on top of it. While the current custom-built tool set meets their needs, the LX Lab team is investigating potential additions to their tech stack that bring out-of-box integrations, increased flexibility, options for in-context review, and other beneficial features.

Special thanks to Markus Meisl, a member of the management team of SAP's language technology and services department for sharing a valuable lesson in localization.

This Lesson in Localization was prepared by Nimdzi's Managing Director, Tucker Johnson. If you wish to learn more, reach out to Tucker at [email protected].