Silicon Valley lies some 9,000 miles away from West Africa, and a world away in terms of high-tech development. Yet organizations working in both regions require some similar skills. When Translators without Borders (TWB) needed help with healthcare initiatives aimed at countries such as Ethiopia, it turned to Content Rules, a Los Gatos-based professional services company that specializes in global content. Its brief was to simplify source material pre-translation to ensure that the end product would be easily understood by people of any background \u2013 absolutely crucial when lives are at stake.<\/p>\n
A global approach<\/strong><\/p>\n CEO Val Swisher explains that Content Rules has worked with content of all types, from words and pictures to multimedia. The company focuses on content strategy, development, and global readiness, to ensure source content is as easy as possible to translate. \u201cOur work might be technical or related to marketing or training and we draw on a team of some 2,000 freelance professionals, including writers, editors, graphic artists and website coders. Our location means we have particular experience in the technology sector which also encompasses life science companies.\u201d This expertise combined with the company\u2019s global perspective means Content Rules is ideally placed to work with Translators without Borders.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just before Christmas a year ago,\u201d recalls Swisher, \u201cthat Translators without Borders approached us with a request to help with their Simple Wikipedia Project, a two-year project to translate into simple English a total of 80 medical articles posted on Wikipedia.\u201d<\/p>\n