Documentation Control:
Multi-language Interface for Product Documentation


  Background

When a company's products are distributed to customers in virtually every country around the world, translation and printing costs for product documentation can be astronomical. If the customer's documentation needs can be satisfied by providing the documentation in electronic media, such as a compact disc (CD), then the documentation cost is dramatically reduced. If multiple languages can be contained on the same CD the savings are even greater.


  Challenge

When documents in over thirty different languages ship on a single CD, with some languages such as Chinese using fonts and special characters that are not easily displayed on most computers, the client needed to ensure that their customers could easily find the appropriate version of the documentation?


  Solution

Alliance Data developed a software tool that, once the documentation CD is inserted into the customer's computer, it automatically conducts an analysis to determine the language options available and the preference of the current computer user. An interface to the product documentation is then presented to the customer in their local language and pointing to the appropriate language version of each document. The tool also provides an interface supporting all language fonts to easily display languages that use complex characters such as Chinese, Kanji, Hebrew, Arabic etc. on computers that otherwise would not support such languages.


  Results

Over 13,000,000 copies of ADC's tool have been distributed around the world with the product documentation of Fortune 100 products.