GlobalSight: Collaborate to Innovate

GlobalSight 8.2 has been out for two weeks, so it's time for another look at some of what's new. You can read the previous post, about improvements to "My Activities", here.

GlobalSight leverages new jobs against existing TMs when a job is created. In the past, there hasn't been a way to re-leverage a job later on, no matter how much time has passed or what else has happened in the system. This limitation was a problem for users working on long-running projects or trying to collaborate with other translators.

However, a new feature in GlobalSight 8.2 makes it easy to re-apply leverage, both against a reference TM or against the translations in other jobs that are still in progress. A companion feature allows a Project Manager to recalculate a job's word counts as needed to reflect the changes.

Using "Update Leverage"

The Update Leverage feature is accessible from the Activity Details page. Clicking "Update Leverage" will bring up the "Update Leverage" screen:

Here, there are several options for the user.

• Update from Jobs. Every In-Progress job in GlobalSight has its own, private TM called a Job TM. The Job TM stores translations made during that job until the job's workflow completes and the translations are written back to a central Storage TM. By checking "Update from Jobs", the user can leverage the current job against the Job TM of another in-progress job that is part of the same project. A custom penalty can be assigned to these matches by setting the "In-Progress TM Penalty" value.
• Re-apply Reference TMs. This will re-leverage the job against the Reference TMs listed in the TM Profile that the job uses.

This is useful in a lot of different situations.

Leveraging against Additional TMs

In a high-volume translation environment, TMs are constantly being updated with new data, either as the result of other translation projects or because of new TMs that have been brought online. Why limit a job to only the translations that were available when it was created? With "Update Leverage", you don't have to.

Collaboration Between Multiple Translators

Before GlobalSight 8.2, when multiple translators worked simultaneously on separate jobs, there was no way for them to share their work. "Update Leverage" fixes that by allowing the translators to leverage each other's job TMs to their own work. For a multi-day project, each translator could upload their offline work at the end of each day, and then leverage against the other jobs the next morning before starting to translate again.

Populating Repetitions by Leveraging Against the Current Job

This one is sneaky, but useful. Some editing environments (including the GlobalSight online editor) don't have a way to automatically propagate the translations of repeated segments throughout a job. "Update Leverage" lets the user re-leverage a job against its own TM, which will work around this limitation.

Updating Word Counts

Updating leverage can affect the word counts for a job. However, the situations in which a user may or may not want to update the word counts for a job in progress are complicated, depending on the business processes involved.

For this initial implementation, we've added the ability to update word counts for a job as a separate feature, decoupled from "Update Leverage".

"Update Word Counts" is available via the Job Details screen, and will recalculate the word counts for a workflow of your choice within a job.

Enabling the Feature

Both "Update Leverage" and "Update Word Counts" have their own permissions.

The permission for "Update Leverage" can be found under the "My Activities" section. For new companies created in GlobalSight 8.2, the "LocalizationParticipant" Permission Group will have this permission checked by default. Existing companies will need to enable it.

The permission for "Update Word Counts" can be found under the "My Jobs" section. For new companies created in GlobalSight 8.2, the "ProjectManager" Permission Group will have this permission checked by default. Existing companies will need to enable it.

Limitations

This is the first release of these features, so there are a couple things we're looking to improve in the future.

• "Update Leverage" will only affect segments that are fuzzy matches or have no matches. This is usually the right behavior, since it's difficult to judge when one 100% match should be preferred over another.
• Similarly, "Update Leverage" won't touch things that have ever been translated by a person. In other words, if a user translates a segment, "Update Leverage" won't touch it in the future, even if the human translation is removed. This can be a little constraining, because it also applies to repetitions of other segments. One can imagine a situation where a reviewer flags a translation as incorrect -- if that segment is repeated elsewhere in the job, the error must be fixed in each place by hand, rather than being able to use "Update Leverage" to propagate the change. We're looking at ways to improve this while still making sure we don't overwrite valid translations by mistake.
• For now, you can only leverage from one other job at a time
• "Update Word Counts" can only be used on a single workflow at a time. This will be changed in the next release.

With the release of GlobalSIght 8.2 this week, we wanted to give more information about some of the new things in the release.  For many users, "My Activities" screen is the most important part of GlobalSight -- it's how many users manages their work.  So it is a natural place to start talking about what's new in GlobalSight 8.2.

Performance

We've been looking at the performance of the "My Activities" page since GlobalSight 8.1.1, when we dramatically improved how the page behaves when there are large numbers of jobs to display.  We've continued to improve that part of the product in GlobalSight 8.2, and we're happy with what we've accomplished.  Users should see noticeably faster responses even with large numbers of activities.

Based on internal testing.

Batch Completion of Activities

One of the most common complaints we hear from Welocalize PMs who use GlobalSight is that it's difficult to manage a lot of jobs at once.  It's common for a user to end up with many activities assigned to them at once, such as several Review tasks that are all being completed at the same time.  Once the work is done, the user needs go to the details page for each activity and click the "Task Completed" button.  When more than one activity needs completion, this quickly grows tedious.

In GlobalSight 8.2, we added the "Complete Activity" feature to the My Activities screen to solve just this problem.  Simply select the tasks you want to complete, and advance all the workflows with a single click!

Batch Completion of Workflows

However, we didn't stop there.  There was another problem we kept hearing about.  For various reasons, sometimes users wanted to quickly advance a workflow through multiple steps at once.  Often this happens when the workflow isn't precisely modeling how the translation process works, for example because Translation and Review step are sometimes combined, or there's an optional final step that isn't always performed.  Although not everyone needed it, we found that it was a common request to allow a PM to complete all the remaining activities in a workflow, following the default workflow transitions to the exit.  So we added the "Complete Workflow" button to do this.

The two features each have their own permission setting.  They're enabled by default for the Administrator and ProjectManager permission groups for new companies.  Existing companies will need to enable the features explicitly.