For any company operating in international markets, production of unified multilingual marketing collateral - whether it's a local flier or a global product launch - can be a challenging task. Mother Tongue Communications' WordFlow is a clear-thinking and robust methodology for managing coordinated, multilingual, multinational marketing material.

WordFlow is an on-line system that integrates text in any language and at same time seamlessly accommodates subtle variations required for local, regional and global markets. The result is faster time-to-market, improved quality of communications and significantly reduced cost.

WordFlow is a translation management system that takes your marketing collateral from original agreed concept through all stages of production to distribution of finished article. WordFlow can be accessed in real time, at any time, by all authorised parties in process -your head office, your agency, accredited translators, global, regional and local operations in any country, studio and printers.

The system's key USP is its ability to automatically integrate text in any language, without manual intervention, into master artwork which then passes through an on-line check, amend and approval process, to final make-up and then to print.

The whole trail is fully traceable and audited, and incorporates automatic prompts to ensure that specific tasks are completed to agreed deadlines. Control of budget, as well as process, resides centrally. In-territory teams are no longer independently preparing their own collateral or implementing centrally-mastered material.

Well, for starters, we often give more attention to overheads than audience. It can't be helped. After all, we have to pick up right overhead, separate it from next one, get it on projector properly, check it out on screen, and so on.

While doing those things, we're taking our eyes off audience. At same time, audience spends a lot of time looking at screen, rather than at us. And, nothing detracts from good communication like loss of eye contact with audience.

We're also taking our mind off audience. Instead, we're focusing our thoughts on technical issues involved in showing overhead, including our explanations of visuals.

Then there's amount of material. Almost every time I see a speech with overheads, I see way too much content. One of best lessons I've learned in several years at Toastmasters is that less is more. Don't try to explain everything to your audience, just pick one small sliver of an issue and explain it well - a speech is not a book or a written article!