S02E19: Automation for Translation Companies

Welcome to another episode of the Translation Company Talk podcast. After a brief break, the podcast is back with lots of interesting and valuable interviews with visionaries and leaders in our industry. In this episode we will be exploring the subject of automation beyond machine translation for companies providing language services. Our guest is Matija Kovač from Taia Translations.

Among subjects discussed in our conversation today, we talk about the need for automation, applying different automation techniques to the process of translation, using automation for business processes in production, vendor management, sales and more. We also discuss why our industry is lagging behind in innovating automation solutions and how a change in our thought process can change our perspective.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Translation Company Talk Podcast On Itunes, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favorite platform. Your comments and feedback are very important, please share them with us and don’t forget to give us a 5 star rating on wherever you are listening to this podcast.

Automation for Translation Companies - Transcript

00:00:00 Monolog 

Hello and welcome to the Translation Company Talk, a weekly podcast show focusing on translation services on the language industry. 

00:00:10 Monolog 

The translation company talk covers topics of interest for professionals engaged in the business of translation localization, transcription interpreting. 

00:00:20 Monolog 

And language technologies.  

00:00:22 Monolog 

The translation Company Talk is sponsored by Hybrid Lynx. 

00:00:26 Monolog 

Your host is Sultan Ghaznawi with today’s episode. 

00:00:31 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Translation Company Talk Podcast, we are back after a short break as I was very busy in September. September and October are generally busy months as people return to work from holidays. 

00:00:43 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Conferences are in full swing and work piles up quickly. 

00:00:45 Sultan Ghaznawi 

In any case, we are back with another episode and today I’m excited that we will be covering the subject of embracing. 

00:00:51 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Automation in the language translation process. 

00:00:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I’m sure you all know that AI has been around in the form of machine translation in this industry for what it feels like a couple of decades already, we will be exploring automation 

00:01:03 Sultan Ghaznawi 

beyond that, in our conversation today. 

00:01:05 Sultan Ghaznawi 

My guest today is Mattia Kovac. 

00:01:07 Sultan Ghaznawi 

He has successfully founded two companies, a language school which became to be the biggest language school in Slovenia and a translation platform. 

00:01:14 Sultan Ghaznawi 

He’s first love is languages. 

00:01:15 Sultan Ghaznawi 

He has a studied Chinese language and spent some of his time studying in China. 

00:01:19 Sultan Ghaznawi 

His other love is development. 

00:01:21 Sultan Ghaznawi 

He’s been developing since high school and is the development father of Taia. 

00:01:25 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Mattia and Marco found a Taia to enable a more secure and time efficient translation process, seeing that sending files over email can be a security threat. 

00:01:33 Sultan Ghaznawi 

They decided to create an app with a huge emphasis on keeping the files secure. 

00:01:38 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Since its first launch, the Taia app is consistently developing, creating new features to enable companies and an easy ordering process  

00:01:46 Sultan Ghaznawi 

while being able to oversee all projects, the translation process is supported by the latest translation technology, which enables getting translations up to three times faster than usual in a cost effective manner. 

00:01:59 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Welcome to the Translation Company Talk, Matija. 

00:02:02 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How are you today? 

00:02:02 Matija Kovac 

Hi Sultan, thanks for having me. 

00:02:05 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Please tell us about yourself and what you do? 

00:02:07 Matija Kovac 

So hi, my name is Mattia. 

00:02:09 Matija Kovac 

I come from Europe from a small country called Slovenia and I’m by education language professional, but by profession I am a developer. 

00:02:20 Matija Kovac 

I am head of development at Taia Translations. 

00:02:23 Matija Kovac 

The startup that I co-founded. 

00:02:25 Matija Kovac 

And we are focusing on building a platform for automation in the localization industry. 

00:02:31 Matija Kovac 

So we try to help clients who need translation services and get them as fast and as efficiently as possible by leveraging high level of automation with a human in the loop process. 

00:02:46 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Very very exciting. 

00:02:47 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I would love to hear a lot more about that. 

00:02:49 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How long have you been in this industry, Matija? 

00:02:51 Matija Kovac 

So I started working on my first startup in 2014 and it was a language school and a few years after we saw that a lot of our clients were looking to us if we can handle their translation services as well. So thinking about 2016 something like that, we started working more seriously. 

00:03:12 Matija Kovac 

And providing translation services and then in 2018, we realized that there’s no way to start a business or there’s no need for another LSP on the market. 

00:03:23 Matija Kovac 

But there’s a huge demand for there’s a huge gap between what the technology can allow and can be done with, and what the market is actually offering. 

00:03:33 Matija Kovac 

So that’s how we started working on what is now known as Taia. 

00:03:37 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Please share a few words if you will about your journey in the localization space. 

00:03:42 Sultan Ghaznawi 

What were some of the most significant observations that impressed you speaking from a technology perspective? 

00:03:48 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Of course. 

00:03:48 Matija Kovac 

Right so, as I mentioned already, I’m I’m a nerd. 

00:03:52 Matija Kovac 

I I love computers and everything related to decoding and I’ve been working on this for a while so it was very shocking to me when I learned back in the day that a lot of the translation industry still relies on sending content. 

00:04:07 Matija Kovac 

Around via email. 

00:04:08 Matija Kovac 

Sales and preparing quotes for clients in so like software that requires a lot of manual work. 

00:04:16 Matija Kovac 

Sometimes companies even still use Excel to build a quote for for each client separately every time. 

00:04:23 Matija Kovac 

And this is like the the the amount of wasted human time. 

00:04:29 Matija Kovac 

And potential that I saw in the industry was what 

00:04:33 Matija Kovac 

Drove me to start working on this platform, so with my initial idea that we should automate as much of this as possible to allow for people to have a better lifestyle so they can work on things that are more interesting and not do repetitive monkey tasks everyday. 

00:04:50 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Let’s talk about the topic. 

00:04:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Of our conversation, you mentioned automation. 

00:04:55 Sultan Ghaznawi 

It has made significant progress and translation and localization. 

00:04:59 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Almost all of us have embraced it and executing translation work 

00:04:59 Matija Kovac 

That’s true. 

00:05:03 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Mission work tell me how are we using it in processes around translation and the language services. 

00:05:09 Matija Kovac 

Right, so yeah, when we started there was like new machine translation was something that was almost brand. 

00:05:16 Matija Kovac 

New if you. 

00:05:17 Matija Kovac 

Remember it was, I think it was 2016 when first actual neural machine translation engines came out on the market and adoption was very slow in the early stages. 

00:05:28 Matija Kovac 

There was a lot of. 

00:05:29 Matija Kovac 

Machine translation already in the past, but mostly it was based on older technologies like statistical models. 

00:05:36 Matija Kovac 

And even in the recent years, finally companies are catching up and starting to use this. 

00:05:42 Matija Kovac 

This is just one part of the entire translation process, so if you imagine how a client would oreder their translation services within LSP, a lot of this is is what the translators. 

00:05:56 Matija Kovac 

Are doing and this is now. 

00:05:57 Matija Kovac 

Finally being you. 

00:05:59 Matija Kovac 

Know speed up with with all these systems from neural machine translation, so translators can work faster. 

00:06:06 Matija Kovac 

But then there’s this whole part all around this that’s not done by translators or other vendors, but it’s actually done by project managers and administration and vendor managers and so on. 

00:06:18 Matija Kovac 

And this is something that, in my opinion, is also has a huge potential for automation. 

00:06:23 Matija Kovac 

We can. 

00:06:24 Matija Kovac 

We can make these things much faster. 

00:06:26 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So if you were to identify at a high level what areas are mature to be automated within the language services delivery space, what would they be? 

00:06:34 Matija Kovac 

Definitely, I think processing of files is something that we’re doing very well in our end. 

00:06:41 Matija Kovac 

I can’t speak for other competitors in the market, but it’s I. 

00:06:45 Matija Kovac 

I know this is something that our clients really like that when they drag and drop a file into the app immediately in seconds they get a fully analyzed document of a full analyzed report so they know exactly how much translation memory is. 

00:07:01 Matija Kovac 

Being used, how much are they going to 

00:07:03 

Need to pay. 

00:07:03 Matija Kovac 

For the project, and even when it’s going to be delivered and this is one part that’s not automated with all the providers or most of them and something that works well for us. 

00:07:15 Matija Kovac 

This is something that our. 

00:07:16 Matija Kovac 

Clients like because it’s very intransparent. 

00:07:18 Matija Kovac 

They just drop the files and they immediately know how much it’s going to cost them and when they can expect it. 

00:07:24 Matija Kovac 

But then there’s other areas as well, like how you manage the project, how you manage your vendors, how you manage your administration. 

00:07:31 Matija Kovac 

We have a lot of already in place, but still there’s a long road ahead of us. 

00:07:36 Matija Kovac 

Of what else we can? 

00:07:37 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Automate so please explain how do you see applying automation and the project management models that most translation companies use today? 

00:07:46 Matija Kovac 

Well, this is so. 

00:07:48 

I I don’t want to. 

00:07:50 Matija Kovac 

I explained too much. 

00:07:51 Matija Kovac 

Maybe I would give away some some company secrets. 

00:07:55 Speaker 1 

But one thing we’re. 

00:07:56 Matija Kovac 

Looking at is predictions on which translators are most likely to accept a job and are going to also perform well on this job. 

00:08:06 Matija Kovac 

And this is the part where we’re looking into. 

00:08:08 Matija Kovac 

How to automate 

00:08:10 Matija Kovac 

We don’t have this fully solved yet, but it’s definitely an interesting area. 

00:08:15 Matija Kovac 

For us, because you lose even less time by allocating a job to the right translator. 

00:08:21 Matija Kovac 

If you are able to predict whether or not they will be available or not for this task. 

00:08:27 Matija Kovac 

But then there’s other stuff also in the vendor management process, because when you start onboarding thousands upon thousands of vendors, there are certain tasks that could be automated and speed up in order to make sure that you are working with the right people at the right time, right? 

00:08:45 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So when it comes to production models, uh, there are so many things that can be automated. 

00:08:51 Sultan Ghaznawi 

It’s not just simply the task of. 

00:08:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

For example, the handing off and handing back in of the work. 

00:08:59 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Can you elaborate a little bit on what specific activities have you been managed to successfully automate? 

00:09:05 Matija Kovac 

Oh, that’s a it’s. 

00:09:06 Matija Kovac 

A difficult question because there’s so many little little points there, so many different things we do, and there’s so much more we have planned still, but how? 

00:09:19 Matija Kovac 

How to go about this? 

00:09:20 Matija Kovac 

Well, definitely one thing that. 

00:09:24 Matija Kovac 

Saves us a bunch of time and our clients really appreciate is the full or not. 

00:09:29 Matija Kovac 

Needed updating of translation memories depending on what’s going on with the project, so our PM doesn’t have to do as much work on gathering the right teams and and cleaning up those teams and and pushing them back into the system. 

00:09:45 Matija Kovac 

This part is mostly, if not entirely automated. 

00:09:49 Matija Kovac 

In our case. 

00:09:50 Matija Kovac 

So as long as we handle the process inside our platform, which means that everything is translated, revised and proof read inside our ecosystem that the teams are going to follow this entirely automatically and you can see it all in different stages. 

00:10:07 Matija Kovac 

So there’s quite quite a big advantage here. 

00:10:10 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So this is the type of automation that happens behind the scenes where a PM, for example clicks a button and then something happens and the the system comes back with some sort of error. 

00:10:21 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Now, do you know if our industry has implemented robotic process automation or RPA for sure to automate mundane project management or vendor management activities? 

00:10:30 Matija Kovac 

I’m not familiar with this expression, though I don’t think it’s very common in our industry. 

00:10:35 Matija Kovac 

It’s more common in in manufacturing industries. 

00:10:39 Matija Kovac 

If I’m not mistaken and so. 

00:10:41 Matija Kovac 

Would you mind maybe? 

00:10:43 Matija Kovac 

Explaining a bit more what what kind of tasks do you have in mind? 

00:10:48 Matija Kovac 

That could be. 

00:10:49 Matija Kovac 

Be performed by by this sort of process automation. 

00:10:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Well, as far as I’m familiar with the RPA, it’s a software based automation where you can actually tell the software this automation software what to do with the user interface of another software. 

00:11:05 Sultan Ghaznawi 

For example, you can teach it to check my email, check new orders from customers. 

00:11:10 Sultan Ghaznawi 

If an email looks like this is this is an order from a customer. 

00:11:13 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Read it and log it into this ERP system that I have and from there I identify the language and from the language. 

00:11:23 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Obviously the ERP will give you a list of. 

00:11:25 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Vendors and these are my top five vendors. 

00:11:28 Sultan Ghaznawi 

For example, sending email to these top five vendors for that specific language and by the time you come in the morning, most of the work is done for you. 

00:11:37 Sultan Ghaznawi 

It’s as if the software replaced one of the project managers who would be doing all of this, clicking back and forth. 

00:11:44 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I haven’t implemented this. 

00:11:45 Sultan Ghaznawi 

But I have a deep interest in RPA. 

00:11:48 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Is this something you’re familiar with? 

00:11:50 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Do you think that it has a place for automation in our industry? 

00:11:54 Matija Kovac 

Definitely has. 

00:11:55 Matija Kovac 

Like any industry in these days in our industry is not secure from automation. 

00:12:01 Matija Kovac 

In fact, it’s much needed because there’s still so much manual work going on. 

00:12:07 Matija Kovac 

And yeah, but I think what you just mentioned, it definitely covers part of what we already do. 

00:12:12 Matija Kovac 

It’s tier and even other companies. 

00:12:14 Matija Kovac 

Do it successfully. 

00:12:15 Matija Kovac 

And it can be extended even further. 

00:12:17 Matija Kovac 

So one way to go about this is by building different integrations into different systems. 

00:12:23 Matija Kovac 

So so one thing we do, for example, is we connect with our clients. 

00:12:28 Matija Kovac 

Databases or ERP systems or or E commerce platforms or whatever they’re using to manage their content and when they require a certain type of translation, they, or even if they just like input a new product description, it would automatically be sent. 

00:12:48 Matija Kovac 

Over the API. 

00:12:49 Matija Kovac 

Integration to our system and our system would analyze it and depending on what the language combination is and what the type of content is, a different type of service would be ordered. 

00:13:01 Matija Kovac 

In some cases you would go with a full on translation, editing and proofreading. 

00:13:06 Matija Kovac 

In some cases you would go with something faster and cheaper because you don’t have such high requirements. 

00:13:11 Matija Kovac 

And when we. 

00:13:12 Matija Kovac 

Are done on our end with the process. 

00:13:14 Matija Kovac 

So basically when the translator is done with the project and the PM checks the file the the the the project in Arc C Desk complete, it’s automatically sent back. 

00:13:25 Matija Kovac 

Via API to the clients platform formatted correctly and already available on their website or whatever they’re using. 

00:13:33 Matija Kovac 

So this is. 

00:13:35 Matija Kovac 

Like basic API integrations were not so basic. 

00:13:38 Matija Kovac 

It gets kind of complex. 

00:13:40 Matija Kovac 

You go deeper into it. 

00:13:42 Speaker 1 

But we’re a. 

00:13:43 Matija Kovac 

Lot of us in the industry and specifically as a tier we do a lot of this on a daily basis with a bunch of clients, and there’s more of this and the demand is definitely growing. 

00:13:53 Matija Kovac 

So this is something we’re seeing already, but but you were mentioning is something even more general. 

00:13:58 Matija Kovac 

It’s like, uh, including the you’re probably familiar with Zapier and similar tools that are very easy to use for day-to-day users. 

00:14:07 Matija Kovac 

Something like that right? 

00:14:08 Matija Kovac 

And integration with separate it was allowing you to set up a basic bots. 

00:14:13 Matija Kovac 

That’s going to do something. 

00:14:14 Matija Kovac 

Depending on what you 

00:14:16 Matija Kovac 

Put the parameters sign right. 

00:14:19 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So I mentioned vendor management. 

00:14:22 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Speaking of which, it is in an area where there’s a lot of repeat and mundane work which can and should be automated in my opinion. 

00:14:30 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How do you see automation providing value in the supply chain process? 

00:14:35 Matija Kovac 

Well, one thing it does is. 

00:14:37 Matija Kovac 

It brings down the cost, so it style. 

00:14:40 Matija Kovac 

We’re all about lean development. 

00:14:44 Matija Kovac 

Don’t do costs that are not required so we can keep the prices competitive and we can keep growing in. 

00:14:51 Matija Kovac 

The market and by keeping our costs down, we can keep the costs down for our clients. 

00:14:56 Matija Kovac 

So by automating a lot of. 

00:14:58 Matija Kovac 

Our work we, we keep it more affordable to our clients and therefore everyone wins, right? 

00:15:05 Speaker 1 

Right? 

00:15:05 Matija Kovac 

And, and in the end if we don’t need 10 vendor managers but only need 2. 

00:15:11 Matija Kovac 

To manage the same team of vendors and the same number of newly on boarded vendors, we’ve all one right? 

00:15:18 Matija Kovac 

It’s it’s better for everyone and even our vendors are happier be given and their managers are happier because they can focus on. 

00:15:26 Matija Kovac 

Better tasks they don’t have to do. 

00:15:28 Matija Kovac 

Click and repeat monkey jobs. 

00:15:30 Matija Kovac 

They can do more interesting things and actually put their time into working with the people that they’re onboarding, right? 

00:15:37 Matija Kovac 

So they develop relationships and all that. 

00:15:39 Matija Kovac 

So this I think this is the whole point of automation actually, not only in our industry, but in the in the. 

00:15:46 Matija Kovac 

Global idea of automation as a whole was supposed to be not to take people jobs, but to make people jobs more interesting so we can work on the stuff where humans are actually needed and leave the stuff that’s not interesting 

00:16:03 Matija Kovac 

Getting to us to robots or computers or however you. 

00:16:07 Matija Kovac 

Want to call them and? 

00:16:09 Matija Kovac 

In vendor management, of course you can do. 

00:16:10 Matija Kovac 

A lot of things you can. 

00:16:12 Matija Kovac 

You can do testing partly automated. 

00:16:15 Matija Kovac 

You can do data collection and sorting and inputting, partly automated and even. 

00:16:21 Matija Kovac 

All the way down to similarly. 

00:16:23 Matija Kovac 

What you do in digital marketing where you have fully automated campaigns and a lot of times users are not even aware of that? 

00:16:30 Matija Kovac 

You could even. 

00:16:31 Matija Kovac 

Go so far and build relations with your vendors on that level it. 

00:16:37 Matija Kovac 

I don’t prefer that, but technically. 

00:16:39 Matija Kovac 

It’s totally do able 

00:16:40 Matija Kovac 

All right? 

00:16:41 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Absolutely now Mattia we talked about the value that automation presents to the language company side of things. 

00:16:51 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Now can you please talk about how automating things in vendor management and project management improve the experience for translators and interpreters you touched upon that briefly? 

00:17:02 Sultan Ghaznawi 

But can you elaborate a little bit? 

00:17:04 Speaker 1 

One thing we, we. 

00:17:06 Matija Kovac 

Do that Tyler is that we keep everything in the same ecosystem. 

00:17:08 Matija Kovac 

So if you imagine previously translators would need to either buy their own software or they would be provided with a copy of the software by the LSP that they’re working with and a lot of times vendors, translators, proofreaders and so on. 

00:17:24 Matija Kovac 

Are freelancers who work from home or from a coworking space or something like that, and for them, keeping up with the new tech and keeping, keeping their software updated and having ten different cat tools to use with ten different agencies 

00:17:42 Matija Kovac 

That they work with. 

00:17:44 Matija Kovac 

Is probably a burden that’s one thing, and the other thing is, it’s also highly insecure, so when you as a client send your files via email to your local agency, and that agency sends those files via email to the local translator and the translator works in their pajamas. 

00:18:04 Matija Kovac 

On a 10 year old laptop that they don’t regularly update and keep secure, probably in a public cafe or something like that, your files are not secure. 

00:18:16 Matija Kovac 

Not anymore. 

00:18:16 Matija Kovac 

Not at that state. 

00:18:18 Matija Kovac 

When we needed tires, we streamlined the whole process so everything the translators have to do is part of our platform. 

00:18:25 Matija Kovac 

It’s inside the same ecosystem, so they don’t have to download the files. 

00:18:29 Matija Kovac 

They don’t have to store them on their hard drives and they get to work in a cloud system in a cloud platform. 

00:18:38 Matija Kovac 

Is always up to date and very fast and allows them to work much better than they would. 

00:18:44 Matija Kovac 

Without decent cat tools or without any help from automation. 

00:18:49 Matija Kovac 

By our measurements they are usually capable of working up to three to four times faster than they would translate it manually. 

00:18:58 Matija Kovac 

So if you make a regular business document, which is something we do on a daily basis. 

00:19:05 Matija Kovac 

And that’s not very creative. 

00:19:07 Matija Kovac 

Copy just the contractor, something that has to get done on a daily basis and has a lot of repetitive content we can with this level of automation with teams and teams and all of that help them to translate much faster. 

00:19:21 Matija Kovac 

So for translators this is good because we pay them by the word. 

00:19:24 Matija Kovac 

We don’t pay them by the. 

00:19:25 Matija Kovac 

Hour and they can. 

00:19:27 Matija Kovac 

Work much more. 

00:19:28 Matija Kovac 

Efficiently this way. 

00:19:29 Matija Kovac 

In a system that’s always kept up to date for them and is always secure so they don’t have to burden themselves with security and all those issues. 

00:19:38 Matija Kovac 

This is 1 aspect, but there’s probably more. 

00:19:41 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Switching gears, a little material here. 

00:19:44 Sultan Ghaznawi 

We’ve talked about the the translation process and obviously what value automation can present on to both sides, the supply and the buyer side. 

00:19:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Now automation and sales function has been a long running offering. 

00:19:56 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I mean Salesforce and others. 

00:19:58 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Have done a great job. 

00:20:00 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How do you see sales automation creating value for translation companies? 

00:20:03 Matija Kovac 

Prod, that’s a. 

00:20:05 Matija Kovac 

That’s a very complex question. 

00:20:07 Matija Kovac 

And what I’d like. 

00:20:08 Matija Kovac 

To say, see some answers to as well. 

00:20:10 Matija Kovac 

So anyone out there is listening to this we we would love some experienced people. 

00:20:16 Matija Kovac 

Help us with our marketing and our sales because it’s not that we’re not doing well, but we can always do better and I love to learn new stuff. 

00:20:25 Matija Kovac 

And here I think I’m I met him at my. 

00:20:28 

At the end of. 

00:20:29 Matija Kovac 

My rope when it comes to my skills for for sales automation so, but let me let me try to walk you. 

00:20:34 Matija Kovac 

Briefly, through what? 

00:20:35 Matija Kovac 

We do we we. 

00:20:37 

Try to. 

00:20:39 Matija Kovac 

Run marketing campaigns that are very targeted and we try to automate a lot of the lead generation process and and all of that. 

00:20:49 Matija Kovac 

That’s going on and therefore deliver higher value leads directly to our sales team. 

00:20:56 Matija Kovac 

So one thing we try to do. 

00:20:58 Matija Kovac 

Is to keep our sales team occupied with warm leads and not get them to do cold calling so. 

00:21:06 Matija Kovac 

So much and there that’s how they can convert better and work with people and invest their time into people who are actually interested in our product and are actually interested in changing their language, service provider or whatever that they’re using at this stage. 

00:21:24 Matija Kovac 

That said, it’s a. 

00:21:26 Matija Kovac 

Very complex industry. 

00:21:28 Matija Kovac 

It’s extremely fragmented. 

00:21:30 Matija Kovac 

You’re going to find clients who. 

00:21:32 Matija Kovac 

Have 5000 or more employees and don’t have a translation or localization system in place, even though they should. 

00:21:41 Matija Kovac 

But on the other hand, you. 

00:21:42 Matija Kovac 

Might find very small startups who are very very well educated when it comes to localization and have dedicated teams localization managers. 

00:21:53 Matija Kovac 

They already have their software. 

00:21:56 Matija Kovac 

Place and for us it’s kind of one of the major issues at this point, and I’ll be honest about it. 

00:22:01 Matija Kovac 

Is finding the right type of client because we work with both very small companies and huge multinationals. 

00:22:09 Matija Kovac 

We work with companies in very modern software as a service or tech industry or. 

00:22:15 Matija Kovac 

Something like that. 

00:22:16 Matija Kovac 

But a lot of times we works with very traditional clients like manufacturing companies and so on. 

00:22:24 Matija Kovac 

And it’s it’s really like there’s no safe spot to say this is exactly our client, and that’s how we can automate the sales. 

00:22:33 Matija Kovac 

To to get them. 

00:22:34 Matija Kovac 

This is something we’re quite honestly still struggling with. 

00:22:37 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Let’s switch gears. 

00:22:39 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Again, a little bit and talk about automating management processes and reporting analytics if you will. 

00:22:45 Sultan Ghaznawi 

This is an area I think that almost every industry is mature in terms of getting some degree of automation done. 

00:22:52 Sultan Ghaznawi 

What are your thoughts? 

00:22:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

First thing. 

00:22:54 Matija Kovac 

You need to do is gather your data. 

00:22:56 Matija Kovac 

That’s that. 

00:22:57 Matija Kovac 

That’s something we had to work around as well. 

00:22:59 Matija Kovac 

So even though we try to keep everything in the same platform, there’s still, you know, marketing runs in five different tools. 

00:23:07 Matija Kovac 

Sales uses 4 different tools. 

00:23:09 Matija Kovac 

Some other teams use other tools, so you need to usually what you would do is either find tools that can be connected well and go with something simple, like for example we use Google Data studio because it’s free. 

00:23:25 Matija Kovac 

It’s easy to set up and it connects with a bunch of things. 

00:23:29 Matija Kovac 

And it allows us to build interactive dashboards where we can find our all of our numbers on our KPIs. 

00:23:35 Matija Kovac 

All important statistics in the blink of. 

00:23:39 Matija Kovac 

An eye for the. 

00:23:40 Matija Kovac 

Entire company and we’ve set this up in recent months and working very well. 

00:23:44 Matija Kovac 

For us, but the next stage is definitely going to build a decent data warehouse to to go with a proper VI tool. 

00:23:52 Matija Kovac 

That’s going to help you to analyze. 

00:23:53 Matija Kovac 

Things much better. 

00:23:54 Matija Kovac 

And to make. 

00:23:57 Matija Kovac 

Data driven decisions right? 

00:23:58 Matija Kovac 

Because we are in. 

00:24:00 Matija Kovac 

The era where sorry. 

00:24:03 Matija Kovac 

Excuse me 

00:24:04 Matija Kovac 

We’re in the era where you need to make decisions very, very carefully and selectively otherwise. 

00:24:11 Matija Kovac 

You can end up with wrong decisions and in this day and age with such a competitive and fast evolving market that can be very costly. 

00:24:20 Matija Kovac 

So yeah, data driven. 

00:24:23 Matija Kovac 

Make sure you have your your your data stored and prepared correctly and then go. 

00:24:31 Matija Kovac 

Into analyzing it. 

00:24:33 Matija Kovac 

When it comes to reporting, I am a big fan of automated reporting. 

00:24:38 Matija Kovac 

The one thing I hate most is when you’re working in a corporation and you spend half of your day preparing reports for your middle management senior management, that usually no one ever reads because they’re too busy making their own reports for their. 

00:24:53 Matija Kovac 

Middle management. 

00:24:54 Matija Kovac 

And so on and so forth up the chain. 

00:24:57 Matija Kovac 

So this is something we definitely still can’t avoid at this stage, because we’re still a very small company, but I hope we can avoid it also in the future and keep. 

00:25:07 Matija Kovac 

Of reporting and data gathering. 

00:25:11 Matija Kovac 

Automate it as much as possible. 

00:25:13 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Besides productivity gains material, what else can automation offer to translation companies? 

00:25:19 Matija Kovac 

It’s not only about productivity and keeping. 

00:25:24 Matija Kovac 

Costs and time. 

00:25:26 Matija Kovac 

Required low, it’s also about increasing quality, right? 

00:25:29 Matija Kovac 

So very. 

00:25:31 Matija Kovac 

Old technologies back in 90s or even sooner, maybe already allowed for translation memories to be used and to help they keep things more consistent across the board. 

00:25:45 Matija Kovac 

So if you have multiple translators working on similar projects, sharing a common translation memory. 

00:25:51 Matija Kovac 

Can help them work more consistently and provide a more consistent. 

00:25:57 Matija Kovac 

Inflation, but in in recent years with the rise of AI and neural networks, what we see is also a huge potential in helping translators find better ways to express something or helping them keep the grammar correct and not only that, but also. 

00:26:17 Matija Kovac 

Come up with creative new ways of saying things and by gathering all of this data with this new new class of AI with through a transformer. 

00:26:29 Matija Kovac 

Of course you can also generate a bunch of cool content we’ve all seen last year. 

00:26:35 Matija Kovac 

What GPT 3 did does a very impressive new cover to the industry, but even from here on there’s there’s already talk about way more sophisticated models that are going to help not only translate. 

00:26:49 Matija Kovac 

Also generate content or recreate it if you want read. 

00:26:55 Matija Kovac 

How’s it called again transcription right? 

00:26:58 Speaker 2 

This podcast is made possible with sponsorship from hybrid links, a human in the loop provider of translation and data collection services for healthcare, education, legal and government sectors. Visithybridlinks.com to learn more. 

00:27:08 Sultan Ghaznawi 

2nd, so that represents an opportunity for even new sub industries or subsectors to form or then the translation and localization industry talk to me about some of these. 

00:27:23 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Where do you see automation playing a role? 

00:27:26 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I mean, if we’re talking about neural Nets. 

00:27:29 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Machine learning in general. 

00:27:30 Sultan Ghaznawi 

What type of opportunities it presents for translation companies to reformulate what they’re doing and offer a business solution. 

00:27:37 Matija Kovac 

We’ve already seen this in the market in the last year. Some of the existing LSP’s already started also working on data annotation services. 

00:27:46 Matija Kovac 

So when when you have a bunch of data that someone needs to label and make sure that it can be used for for training the new AI. 

00:27:56 Matija Kovac 

And since a lot of this data is. 

00:27:59 Matija Kovac 

Usually informal texts and you have LSPS. 

00:28:02 Matija Kovac 

On the other hand who already have an army of freelance series already working with them and they have all these processes in place. 

00:28:09 Matija Kovac 

They are quite for. 

00:28:11 Matija Kovac 

For now, speed might be quite a good way to pivot into something like this, and we’ve seen cases of this in the last. 

00:28:19 Matija Kovac 

But there’s like you said yourself, with the growing industry and growing technology, there’s new niche products coming in that weren’t even. 

00:28:31 Matija Kovac 

Available a few years ago and I’m really excited to see what else companies are going to come up with and what new business models can be evolved out of this. 

00:28:40 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How do you? 

00:28:41 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Implement a vision that’s based on a combination of manpower and automation. 

00:28:46 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Where does this thinking come from? 

00:28:48 Matija Kovac 

I think this there’s there’s. 

00:28:51 Matija Kovac 

Been a lot of. 

00:28:52 Matija Kovac 

Talk and a lot of hatred going on against automation. 

00:28:56 Matija Kovac 

In in our industry specifically, but in other industries as well, and as I mentioned previously, I think the whole point of automation is to to make human lives more meaningful. 

00:29:07 Matija Kovac 

And we’ve been doing it since the Neolithic since we started settling down and becoming a civilized society. 

00:29:14 Matija Kovac 

We’ve always found ways to make our work. 

00:29:18 Matija Kovac 

Our labor less intensive and made tools and made other things that help us and essentially I see. 

00:29:25 Matija Kovac 

AI’s and automation is just another tool that’s going to help us do things. It’s a very revolutionary tool, but so was the wheel, and so was the steam engine, and they made a lot of people to have to change their lives. But you can’t stop this. There’s no way you can. You can stop this sort of technology. 

00:29:46 Matija Kovac 

From being developed if. 

00:29:48 Matija Kovac 

We are not going. 

00:29:49 Matija Kovac 

To develop it, someone else is going. 

00:29:51 Matija Kovac 

To if if people who. 

00:29:52 Matija Kovac 

Have moral standards or high moral standards are not the ones working on this. 

00:29:58 Matija Kovac 

Someone with lower more standards is going. 

00:30:00 Matija Kovac 

To and they’re going to. 

00:30:01 Matija Kovac 

Rockhead work even worse, so we we need to embrace it. 

00:30:05 Matija Kovac 

We need to learn about it, not be afraid of it and find ways how to adapt our lives to to. 

00:30:11 Matija Kovac 

Work with it. 

00:30:12 Matija Kovac 

There’s no other way around it, right? 

00:30:14 Matija Kovac 

And we’ve seen this going. 

00:30:16 Matija Kovac 

This process has been faster and faster and faster in recent years and generations. 

00:30:23 Matija Kovac 

But All in all, I think it’s we run on the brink of a very new era where a lot of our jobs are going to change dramatically and some for the better. 

00:30:36 Matija Kovac 

Some for the worse. 

00:30:37 Matija Kovac 

I guess some jobs that exist today are not even going to exist in 20 years. 

00:30:42 Matija Kovac 

But it’s the same thing if you look 20 years back jobs from 20 years ago don’t exist anymore. 

00:30:48 Matija Kovac 

No one fixes fax machines, right? 

00:30:51 Matija Kovac 

They don’t exist, they’re out of date and. 

00:30:54 Matija Kovac 

We we need to learn how. 

00:30:57 Matija Kovac 

To live with that, it’s just that thing. 

00:30:58 Matija Kovac 

So if there’s a piece of advice, Start learning. 

00:31:02 Matija Kovac 

Start researching. 

00:31:04 Matija Kovac 

Don’t be afraid to delve deep into this technology because it’s not as scary as it seems. 

00:31:11 Matija Kovac 

On the surface. 

00:31:12 Matija Kovac 

And for God’s sake, make your children go study computer science or something because. 

00:31:17 Matija Kovac 

We are in high demand of developers and engineers as a society in whole. 

00:31:21 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Absolutely yeah. 

00:31:23 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So just to add to your comment, I think as an industry we also have a responsibility to to make people aware of what technology and automation is and and that they shouldn’t be scared. 

00:31:34 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I mean some of our mega conferences without naming any of them. 

00:31:38 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Keep talking about the low level implementation of. 

00:31:41 Sultan Ghaznawi 

For example, different types of algorithms without telling people what. 

00:31:44 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Business cases can be created from these new technologies and unfortunately everyone is talking about the how not not a lot of people are talking about the what like what can we sell, what these new possibilities available. 

00:31:58 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So anyway that leads to my next question in order to implement automation, do you think? 

00:32:05 Sultan Ghaznawi 

It’s necessary to bring outside help in the form of consultants or other people who are familiar with the automation technologies. 

00:32:12 Matija Kovac 

Well, it really depends on the resources the company has, so a very large company is most likely going to look into acquiring a smaller competitor who has this kind of. 

00:32:22 Matija Kovac 

R&D development already established and has this kind of convergence kind of engineering already available. A much smaller company probably can’t even afford building their own technologies, so they’re going to have to outsource it to a consultant and and outsource it to existing software in the market. And somewhere in the middle. 

00:32:42 Matija Kovac 

You can most likely go into developing partially your own custom solutions, but those can be extremely expensive. 

00:32:50 Matija Kovac 

And yeah, going with the help of some advisors in our case, we obviously our goal is to develop technology that we can then use and also sell onwards. 

00:33:01 Matija Kovac 

So we have our own development team. 

00:33:03 Matija Kovac 

We work very closely on doing this ourselves. 

00:33:09 Matija Kovac 

And keeping the knowledge in house but when necessary, we’re not afraid of engaging with advisors who are much more experienced than we are, and might even bring us a lot more new knowledge to to to our games so. 

00:33:24 Matija Kovac 

Yeah, that’s there’s. 

00:33:25 Matija Kovac 

There’s no best way to do it. 

00:33:27 Matija Kovac 

You know, it really depends on on what what the issue is and what are your resources. 

00:33:32 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Let’s let’s take a look at our industry. 

00:33:35 Sultan Ghaznawi 

From the outside. 

00:33:36 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Are there examples of organizations that you know of in our industry that have successfully adopted automation and and if so, in your opinion, what type of gains are they reporting? 

00:33:48 Matija Kovac 

I I think there are a. 

00:33:49 Matija Kovac 

Lot of them. 

00:33:50 Matija Kovac 

I mean there’s so much going on in in in our industry in recent years. 

00:33:54 Matija Kovac 

If you just look at the number of mergers and acquisitions in the last year when it was a COVID year and and. 

00:34:01 Matija Kovac 

I know a lot of things were stuck because of all the lock downs, but there were over, I think €8 billion of worth of transactions and about 39 different mergers and acquisitions going on. So this definitely shows that the market is very very vibrant when it comes to. 

00:34:20 Matija Kovac 

Acquiring new technology or acquiring competitors. 

00:34:24 Matija Kovac 

So I think what’s what’s happening in in a list in my opinion. 

00:34:29 Matija Kovac 

Is the older players who have been on the market for a longer period of time and are very big and and well spread. 

00:34:37 Matija Kovac 

Don’t have such a good insight into what the technology is capable of or haven’t been up to date. 

00:34:44 Matija Kovac 

Haven’t been evolving as fast as they should to keep up with the recent technological developments. 

00:34:50 Matija Kovac 

So how they’re compensating for is is that they’re acquiring younger companies who are more technically. 

00:34:57 Matija Kovac 

Versatile and who knew how to handle all these new technologies out there? 

00:35:02 Matija Kovac 

So it’s it’s kind. 

00:35:03 Matija Kovac 

Of an opportunity. 

00:35:05 Matija Kovac 

For both of them. 

00:35:06 Matija Kovac 

On the one hand, big players can stay up to date by acquiring younger players who have this technology, and for younger players it’s a good way. 

00:35:16 Matija Kovac 

To consider as an exit strategy I guess. 

00:35:19 Sultan Ghaznawi 

We talked about this in general terms earlier, but what about artificial intelligence and automation? 

00:35:25 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I mean, you can automate things using rules. 

00:35:28 Sultan Ghaznawi 

And heuristics, but AI completely introduces a new paradigm. 

00:35:32 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Here I’m guessing machine learning can introduce a different dimension and the automation concept altogether. 

00:35:38 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How do we prepare or even pioneer such solutions? 

00:35:41 

But in in. 

00:35:42 Matija Kovac 

A large way we already do right? So the what the one thing that we’ve mentioned previously is the shift from statistical machine translation engines to neural machine translation engines, whereas like it only happened in the last five years, they didn’t even exist back before 2016. Neural machine. 

00:36:01 Matija Kovac 

Translation wasn’t even a thing. 

00:36:03 Matija Kovac 

And now I mean if if you remember. 

00:36:06 Matija Kovac 

Google Translate was a joke to a lot of people and sometimes still it’s, but the the quality of engines like that. 

00:36:15 Matija Kovac 

This is just the most famous one or or infamous. 

00:36:18 Matija Kovac 

However you want it. 

00:36:20 Matija Kovac 

It has grown tremendously and I think what’s happening is that the buying since the content is growing so faster there’s huge huge. 

00:36:33 Matija Kovac 

Loads and loads of new content being generated on. 

00:36:36 Matija Kovac 

A daily basis. 

00:36:37 Matija Kovac 

And with the availability of localising this content there. 

00:36:43 Matija Kovac 

Will be the. 

00:36:44 Matija Kovac 

Demand of localising it because it’s cheaper than any time in the past to translate it. 

00:36:49 Matija Kovac 

So what’s going to happen is that even though automation is going to take over. 

00:36:56 Matija Kovac 

A lot of the. 

00:37:00 Matija Kovac 

It’s going to take over the parts that are that wouldn’t even get localized before. 

00:37:06 Matija Kovac 

The parts that. 

00:37:07 Matija Kovac 

Even didn’t even exist, like new content that’s popping up. 

00:37:10 Matija Kovac 

Over the Internet. 

00:37:12 Matija Kovac 

On a daily basis and stuff that was traditionally translated by LSP’s and other providers. 

00:37:19 Matija Kovac 

Is still going to get. 

00:37:20 Matija Kovac 

Sold if you if you. 

00:37:21 Matija Kovac 

I think let’s say legal documents you you will probably not going to come. 

00:37:28 Matija Kovac 

Leave Google Translate to translate your entire mortgage contract with your bank for your house, right? 

00:37:36 Matija Kovac 

You probably want to have that translated correct or whatever it is. 

00:37:39 Matija Kovac 

Whatever legal document you need, same goes with the user manuals, for example. 

00:37:44 Matija Kovac 

If you are. 

00:37:45 Matija Kovac 

Producing a forklift and your translations are. 

00:37:48 Matija Kovac 

Are done with Google Translate and that forklift is going to murder someone on some work place. 

00:37:54 Matija Kovac 

Then you will get into trouble, so that’s where you will invest into human in the loop. 

00:38:00 Matija Kovac 

Sort of translation, and this is where we come in. 

00:38:03 Matija Kovac 

So we we provide both. 

00:38:05 Matija Kovac 

We allow our clients to select themselves and this is the part I love the most. 

00:38:10 Matija Kovac 

Because in in the old days. 

00:38:13 Matija Kovac 

The agency would be the one telling you what kind of quality you need. 

00:38:17 Matija Kovac 

It’s the other way around. 

00:38:18 Matija Kovac 

We let the clients decide what kind of quality. 

00:38:21 Matija Kovac 

They they need. 

00:38:22 Matija Kovac 

In what their budget allows for? 

00:38:24 Matija Kovac 

And this is how automation then. 

00:38:27 Matija Kovac 

Steps into all parts of the game. 

00:38:29 Matija Kovac 

You can go full on. 

00:38:30 Matija Kovac 

Automate it if that’s what you need, or you can go but partly automated, but still with a human in the loop process. 

00:38:37 Matija Kovac 

And go with that, and for me that’s the way it should be. 

00:38:40 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Let’s talk about some of the negative implications that automation presents or causes. 

00:38:47 Sultan Ghaznawi 

We know that automation can reduce manual labor because obviously it’s taking away all that repetitive type of work. 

00:38:55 Sultan Ghaznawi 

What else can it affect? 

00:38:56 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Do you think that there are implications with regards to quality with regards to acceptance? 

00:39:01 Sultan Ghaznawi 

And any other areas? 

00:39:02 Matija Kovac 

Definitely I. 

00:39:03 Matija Kovac 

I think one of the main issues we’re we’re going to get into, and we’re already seeing it is over reliance on automation. 

00:39:10 Matija Kovac 

As automation gets good and better and better. 

00:39:14 Matija Kovac 

We tend to rely more often on it, right? 

00:39:18 Matija Kovac 

I I remember a very common case was with self driving cars when, uh, I think it was Google who had one of the first self driving cars and they gave it to a bunch of people and told them to use it. 

00:39:32 Matija Kovac 

But they need to keep their hands on the wheel. 

00:39:34 Matija Kovac 

At all times, similarly, what you have to do in your Tesla still right? 

00:39:39 Matija Kovac 

And they put cameras in the car. 

00:39:41 Matija Kovac 

As well and in the first few hours, people were still holding hands on the steering group because they were not sure if the car is going to do the right thing. 

00:39:50 Matija Kovac 

But after a day or two driving around in a car that does everything perfectly and never kills you, you sit down and you relax and now you have all these videos on the Internet of people using. 

00:40:02 Matija Kovac 

Could literally sleep in their driver seat and let the car do everything for them, and that is a problem because technology doesn’t matter which level we’re talking about either. 

00:40:15 Matija Kovac 

Is it self driving cars who might get very very dangerous and kill people? 

00:40:20 Matija Kovac 

Or if it’s translation services? 

00:40:23 Matija Kovac 

Is you know it it’s it can always be flawed, just like humans can always be flawed. 

00:40:27 Matija Kovac 

So is technology we should not over rely on some things. 

00:40:31 Matija Kovac 

Especially in such early stages of this technology and we see a similar thing with translations. 

00:40:37 Matija Kovac 

When you, when we measure the distance from our translators, do the better the machine translation output, it’s the lower the distance that they do when they translate something, so they they get presented with a pre translated. 

00:40:51 Matija Kovac 

Piece of content which they compare with the original segment and if it’s more or less correct, they’re less inclined to fix it because it’s more or less. 

00:41:00 Matija Kovac 

Correct and we can see that the the level of engagement on the human side then starts dropping, so they would. 

00:41:09 Matija Kovac 

It’s it’s very easy to let a mistake slip this way because you don’t see it because you rely so. 

00:41:16 Matija Kovac 

Much on the empty. 

00:41:17 Matija Kovac 

You just go OK. 

00:41:18 Matija Kovac 

This is fine. 

00:41:18 Matija Kovac 

Move on to the next segment. 

00:41:20 Matija Kovac 

This looks fine. 

00:41:21 Matija Kovac 

Move on to the next segment and then you just skip it. 

00:41:23 Matija Kovac 

You just don’t see. 

00:41:24 Matija Kovac 

But there’s an error somewhere in the middle, right? 

00:41:27 Matija Kovac 

So there Overlines is going to be a. 

00:41:30 Matija Kovac 

Problem that we’re. 

00:41:31 Matija Kovac 

Going to have to work around still. 

00:41:32 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Well, I agree with you that we are quite some distance away from level 5A type of automation. We are still dealing with augmentation with humans now about implementing automation at organizations. Do they affect us on the client side? Of course. How do we respond to the need? 

00:41:52 Sultan Ghaznawi 

For being faster and more efficient as expected by algorithms implemented on our client side. 

00:41:58 Matija Kovac 

That’s a very complex question. 

00:42:01 Matija Kovac 

Uh, yeah there’s I think there’s only one way of going about it, so the the time is here to automate or to be left behind. 

00:42:10 Matija Kovac 

I think that the the players in the industry who will adopt new technologies and will follow the trends and will learn and and develop will be the ones surfing. 

00:42:21 Matija Kovac 

The new wave of automation and the ones who won’t will be left behind and the tsunami that’s coming is going to sweep them out. 

00:42:28 Matija Kovac 

So there’s no other way around it, I. 

00:42:31 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Think so, just to reformulate that question. 

00:42:33 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Let’s say if your client that has been sending you work for manual translation all of a sudden implement their own algorithms where as a supplier of translation services for example, or even in some cases, interpreting where would you add value now. 

00:42:48 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Because the way I see it, for example, if your client has some sort of a streaming service, and before that you had to translate the subtitles and now they’ve automated all of. 

00:42:56 Sultan Ghaznawi 

That, uh, I see an opportunity where you can actually do a handoff of automated transfer. 

00:43:04 Sultan Ghaznawi 

To your company when the content is dealing with something very specialized and you can just add value by correcting it, and by augmenting what their algorithm has done. 

00:43:14 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How do we go about doing that? 

00:43:16 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Where does an LSP pivot to or how do they pivot in order to make sure that they deliver the right type of? 

00:43:23 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Value, yeah. 

00:43:24 Matija Kovac 

So an LSP is quite definitely going to keep. 

00:43:29 Matija Kovac 

Being the human in the loop part. 

00:43:31 Matija Kovac 

So if if your client is is let’s like like you said your example. 

00:43:36 Matija Kovac 

Is really good. 

00:43:36 Matija Kovac 

You have a video content producer or a company that deals with that. 

00:43:41 Matija Kovac 

They need a lot of localization. 

00:43:42 Matija Kovac 

Previously, everything was done manually. 

00:43:44 Matija Kovac 

All the subtitling. 

00:43:45 Matija Kovac 

Now the transcriptions and a lot of the subtitling is already fully automated. 

00:43:50 Matija Kovac 

But it’s not perfect. 

00:43:51 Matija Kovac 

There’s still a need for the human group, at least for the next five years we we see it will still be there. 

00:43:58 Matija Kovac 

And depending on the type of content and the type of users who will engage with this content, probably even much further into the future. 

00:44:06 Matija Kovac 

So if if. 

00:44:07 Matija Kovac 

It’s a YouTube video more. 

00:44:10 Matija Kovac 

Most people are perfectly fine with the with the automated CC right, but there’s still some content where humans will always be present in the loop, so that’s where analysis we can place themselves. 

00:44:22 Matija Kovac 

The problem which I see here is the one that you mentioned. 

00:44:26 Matija Kovac 

If a client. 

00:44:27 Matija Kovac 

Were to do this on their end. 

00:44:29 Matija Kovac 

How do you then integrate with their system to make sure that you’re compliant on your system? 

00:44:34 Matija Kovac 

I look at it from the technical perspective because our. 

00:44:38 Matija Kovac 

It’s Kaya at our company. 

00:44:41 Matija Kovac 

Our paradigm is that we are the ones who provide the the the technology, weird ones who provide the platform for our users. 

00:44:48 Matija Kovac 

We are capable of integrating with a bunch of different systems, but we rather keep everything on our end and get the clients to use our platform. 

00:44:58 Matija Kovac 

So yeah, if if this were to happen to us, for example, if one of our clients and we do subtitling. 

00:45:03 Matija Kovac 

Of course, as. 

00:45:04 Matija Kovac 

Well, we were to decide to automate it on their end entirely and we were just. 

00:45:08 Matija Kovac 

A part of. 

00:45:09 Matija Kovac 

Their loop we could engage with them via an API and keep providing our human in the loop service. 

00:45:14 Matija Kovac 

Yes, but we will receive that they use our platform so. 

00:45:18 Matija Kovac 

We can keep. 

00:45:19 Matija Kovac 

Everything on our end. 

00:45:20 Matija Kovac 

It’s easier for everyone. 

00:45:22 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Yeah, that that would be an ideal scenario, but let’s talk about, uh, where do we go from here? 

00:45:27 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How does the next five year look like in embracing automation within localization industry? 

00:45:32 Matija Kovac 

Cool, that’s $1,000,000 question. 

00:45:34 

Or even more. 

00:45:35 Matija Kovac 

I I I’d love to give you an answer to that, but unfortunately I I don’t think I’m. 

00:45:41 Matija Kovac 

I’m well experienced enough for something like that. 

00:45:44 Matija Kovac 

So definitely what’s going on is the the automation is going to. 

00:45:48 Matija Kovac 

Take off a lot of work. 

00:45:51 Matija Kovac 

Users or companies who. 

00:45:54 Matija Kovac 

Didn’t didn’t use an empty. 

00:45:56 Matija Kovac 

Are definitely going to start using it. 

00:45:58 Matija Kovac 

New jobs are going to pop up as we already mentioned. 

00:46:02 Matija Kovac 

And I think the whole industry is about to to get shook over and and swept over by this tsunami of automation. 

00:46:11 Matija Kovac 

What the end game will be? 

00:46:12 Matija Kovac 

What will be the result of this? 

00:46:14 Matija Kovac 

I think a lot. 

00:46:15 Matija Kovac 

Of the players are going to go. 

00:46:16 Matija Kovac 

Extinct there will be even more mergers and acquisitions coming in. 

00:46:22 Matija Kovac 

A lot of. 

00:46:23 Matija Kovac 

The market will probably consolidate because it’s a very mature market, but it’s extremely fragmented, so it will probably start consolidating even more. 

00:46:34 Matija Kovac 

And we’re already seeing this trend in last years and whoever is not going to automate is just going to be left behind. 

00:46:41 Matija Kovac 

That’s basically the the point of this. 

00:46:43 Matija Kovac 

But we’re playing it. 

00:46:45 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So, so that being said, do you think our industry is prepared to adopt automation at the scale that we are about to see? 

00:46:53 Matija Kovac 

I don’t think any industry is prepared to see what what’s coming in the next five years. 

00:46:57 Matija Kovac 

When it comes to automation. 

00:46:59 Matija Kovac 

As I mentioned previously, just remember when GP came out, even GPT 2 imagine can you remember the type of content it was able to generate and then number three was even more and you know that we can’t even predict what would what AI will be able to do for us in five years. 

00:47:19 Matija Kovac 

It’s a it’s too far ahead for people who like myself who are not very, very specialized in this research. 

00:47:30 Matija Kovac 

We’re merely developers and consumers. 

00:47:32 Matija Kovac 

We’re not researchers. 

00:47:34 Matija Kovac 

And there’s quite a bit of a gap there. 

00:47:37 Matija Kovac 

I don’t think any industry is prepared for what’s going to come up. 

00:47:41 Matija Kovac 

It’s we’re all going to have to embrace it or fail, and I think some players are much more. 

00:47:51 Matija Kovac 

Much well versed in this technology and will be able to support their clients needs and support their their growth. 

00:48:00 Matija Kovac 

By using this technology but not everyone is going to be capable of doing this, obviously. 

00:48:06 Matija Kovac 

So yeah, industry is whole. 

00:48:08 Matija Kovac 

Definitely not some players sure. 

00:48:10 Matija Kovac 

Yeah, yes. 

00:48:12 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Matthew, what’s your message for our industry and and your peers? 

00:48:16 Sultan Ghaznawi 

What would you like to tell them about automation? 

00:48:18 Speaker 1 

Well, I I think. 

00:48:21 Matija Kovac 

We’ve talked a lot about automation. 

00:48:22 Matija Kovac 

We talked about how important it is to embrace the technology, how try not to be afraid of it outright? 

00:48:28 Matija Kovac 

Let’s try to work with it rather than against it, but I think in the end my. 

00:48:33 Matija Kovac 

Message should be that. 

00:48:35 Matija Kovac 

It’s not all about automation, it’s it doesn’t matter what kind of technology your company has. 

00:48:41 Matija Kovac 

If you don’t know how to work with your people. 

00:48:45 Matija Kovac 

If you don’t know how to work with your clients and present a decent human connection, there’s no way you can keep your company successful or or make it successful. 

00:48:55 Matija Kovac 

It’s, I think with all the automation coming in, it’s becoming even more important. 

00:49:01 Matija Kovac 

Come to focus on the human aspect of whatever business that we’re working on, and I honestly hope I sincerely hope that our generation will be able to. 

00:49:11 Matija Kovac 

On the one. 

00:49:12 Matija Kovac 

Hand embrace new technologies like AI to help us work faster and more efficiently. 

00:49:19 Matija Kovac 

But on the other hand, to also. 

00:49:21 Matija Kovac 

Leave more meaningful lives that will allow us to go in for deeper human connection and and work on more. 

00:49:30 Matija Kovac 

We call it culture in our company with with what we’re developing, but I think it’s. 

00:49:34 Matija Kovac 

More of a. 

00:49:36 Matija Kovac 

Mentality, even it’s it’s more of a mind. 

00:49:38 Matija Kovac 

I said so you you, you can find time to work with people and develop this deep relationship with them. 

00:49:44 Matija Kovac 

That’s not my idea here, so hopefully we’re going into this direction. 

00:49:50 Matija Kovac 

The other the other idea is just we’re going into a dystopia, but that would be more. 

00:49:55 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I think we don’t get their media. 

00:49:58 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I agree with you, automation is the future in so many ways, and, uh. 

00:50:02 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I think our industry is also jumping on this bandwagon and we must stay on top of the latest trends in this area so hopefully we can revisit this conversation again. 

00:50:11 Sultan Ghaznawi 

It was a pleasure speaking with you today and as I said, I’m hoping we can do this again in the future and have you in another episode where you can talk about automation and what’s happening with that. 

00:50:21 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I want to. 

00:50:21 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Thank you for your time. 

00:50:22 Matija Kovac 

Thank you Sultan, for having me. 

00:50:24 Matija Kovac 

This was a very engaging conversation and I hope. 

00:50:26 Matija Kovac 

We get to talk again soon. 

00:50:35 Sultan Ghaznawi 

That was a very interesting conversation with Metia. 

00:50:38 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I think he represents what our industry is undergoing at an early stage at the moment. 

00:50:42 Sultan Ghaznawi 

As you heard, automation is perfect for offloading repetitive and mundane tasks from our human workforce to computer processors while freeing up our people to do more exciting things. 

00:50:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

You should ask yourself why should your project manager spend his or her entire day copy pasting when you could do that with an automation solution. 

00:51:00 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Your project manager instead could be spending time talking to your client providing the human touch and making them feel good about doing business with your organization. 

00:51:09 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Automation does not necessarily mean loss of jobs. 

00:51:12 Sultan Ghaznawi 

It simply means. 

00:51:13 Sultan Ghaznawi 

The balancing of work. 

00:51:14 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I think the reason why computers are good with automation is because they lack creativity, which is something neither for more exciting and important things. 

00:51:23 Sultan Ghaznawi 

And you people will enjoy working with people performing more challenging and unique tasks. 

00:51:34 Sultan Ghaznawi 

This brings us to the end of this episode of the podcast. 

00:51:37 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I had a lot of fun talking to material and learning from these experiences. 

00:51:41 Speaker 1 

I hope you. 

00:51:42 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Also had a few action items that you could take and apply to your processes in your organization. 

00:51:47 Sultan Ghaznawi 

If you found this conversation helpful, then you don’t want to miss our future episodes. 

00:51:51 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Don’t forget to subscribe to the translation Company Talk podcast on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify or your platform of choice. 

00:52:00 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Give us a thumbs up or five star rating wherever you’re listening to this podcast until next time.Audio file 

S02E19-Translation_Company_Talk-Automation_for_Translation_Companies-Matija_Kovac-interview.mp3 

 

Transcript 

00:00:00 Monolog 

Hello and welcome to the translation company Talk, a weekly podcast show focusing on translation services on the language industry. 

00:00:10 Monolog 

The translation company talk covers topics of interest for professionals engaged in the business of translation localization, transcription interpreting. 

00:00:20 Monolog 

And language technologies. 

00:00:22 Monolog 

The translation company Talk is sponsored by Hybrid Lynx. 

00:00:26 Monolog 

Your host is Sultan Ghaznawi with today’s episode. 

00:00:31 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Translation Company Talk Podcast, we are back after a short break as I was very busy in September. September and October are generally busy months as people return to work from holidays. 

00:00:43 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Conferences are in full swing and work piles up quickly. 

00:00:45 Sultan Ghaznawi 

In any case, we are back with another episode and today I’m excited that we will be covering the subject of embracing. 

00:00:51 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Automation in the language translation process. 

00:00:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I’m sure you all know that AI has been around in the form of machine translation in this industry for what it feels like a couple of decades already, we will be exploring automation 

00:01:03 Sultan Ghaznawi 

beyond that, in our conversation today. 

00:01:05 Sultan Ghaznawi 

My guest today is Mattia Kovac. 

00:01:07 Sultan Ghaznawi 

He has successfully founded two companies, a language school which became to be the biggest language school in Slovenia and a translation platform. 

00:01:14 Sultan Ghaznawi 

He’s first love is languages. 

00:01:15 Sultan Ghaznawi 

He has a studied Chinese language and spent some of his time studying in China. 

00:01:19 Sultan Ghaznawi 

His other love is development. 

00:01:21 Sultan Ghaznawi 

He’s been developing since high school and is the development father of Taia. 

00:01:25 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Mattia and Marco found a Taia to enable a more secure and time efficient translation process, seeing that sending files over email can be a security threat. 

00:01:33 Sultan Ghaznawi 

They decided to create an app with a huge emphasis on keeping the files secure. 

00:01:38 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Since its first launch, the Taia app is consistently developing, creating new features to enable companies and an easy ordering process  

00:01:46 Sultan Ghaznawi 

while being able to oversee all projects, the translation process is supported by the latest translation technology, which enables getting translations up to three times faster than usual in a cost effective manner. 

00:01:59 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Welcome to the Translation Company Talk, Matija. 

00:02:02 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How are you today? 

00:02:02 Matija Kovac 

Hi Sultan, thanks for having me. 

00:02:05 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Please tell us about yourself and what you! 

00:02:07 Matija Kovac 

So hi, my name is Mattia. 

00:02:09 Matija Kovac 

I come from Europe from a small country called Slovenia and I’m by education language professional, but by profession I am a developer. 

00:02:20 Matija Kovac 

I am head of development at Taia translations. 

00:02:23 Matija Kovac 

The startup that I co-founded. 

00:02:25 Matija Kovac 

And we are focusing on building a platform for automation in the localization industry. 

00:02:31 Matija Kovac 

So we try to help clients who need translation services and get them as fast and as efficiently as possible by leveraging high level of automation with a human in the loop process. 

00:02:46 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Very very exciting. 

00:02:47 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I would love to hear a lot more about that. 

00:02:49 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How long have you been in this industry, Matija? 

00:02:51 Matija Kovac 

So I started working on my first startup in 2014 and it was a language school and a few years after we saw that a lot of our clients were looking to us if we can handle their translation services as well. So thinking about 2016 something like that, we started working more seriously. 

00:03:12 Matija Kovac 

And providing translation services and then in 2018, we realized that there’s no way to start a business or there’s no need for another LSP on the market. 

00:03:23 Matija Kovac 

But there’s a huge demand for there’s a huge gap between what the technology can allow and can be done with, and what the market is actually offering. 

00:03:33 Matija Kovac 

So that’s how we started working on what is now known as Taia. 

00:03:37 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Please share a few words if you will about your journey in the localization space. 

00:03:42 Sultan Ghaznawi 

What were some of the most significant observations that impressed you speaking from a technology perspective? 

00:03:48 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Of course. 

00:03:48 Matija Kovac 

Right so it, as I mentioned already, I’m I’m a nerd. 

00:03:52 Matija Kovac 

I I love computers and everything related to decoding and I’ve been working on this for a while so it was very shocking to me when I learned back in the day that a lot of the translation industry still relies on sending content. 

00:04:07 Matija Kovac 

Around via email. 

00:04:08 Matija Kovac 

Sales and preparing quotes for clients in so like software that requires a lot of manual work. 

00:04:16 Matija Kovac 

Sometimes companies even still use Excel to build a quote for for each client separately every time. 

00:04:23 Matija Kovac 

And this is like the the the amount of wasted human time. 

00:04:29 Matija Kovac 

And potential that I saw in the industry was what? 

00:04:33 Matija Kovac 

Drove me to start working on this platform, so with my initial idea that we should automate as much of this as possible to allow for people to have a better lifestyle so they can work on things that are more interesting and not do repetitive monkey tasks everyday. 

00:04:50 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Let’s talk about the topic. 

00:04:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Of our conversation, you mentioned automation. 

00:04:55 Sultan Ghaznawi 

It has made significant progress and translation and localization. 

00:04:59 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Almost all of us have embraced it and executing transl. 

00:04:59 Matija Kovac 

That’s true. 

00:05:03 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Mission work tell me how are we using it in processes around translation and the language services. 

00:05:09 Matija Kovac 

Right, so yeah, when we started there was like new machine translation was something that was almost brand. 

00:05:16 Matija Kovac 

New if you. 

00:05:17 Matija Kovac 

Remember it was, I think it was 2016 when first actual neural machine translation engines came out on the market and adoption was very slow in the early stages. 

00:05:28 Matija Kovac 

There was a lot of. 

00:05:29 Matija Kovac 

Machine translation already in the past, but mostly it was based on older technologies like statistical models. 

00:05:36 Matija Kovac 

And even in the recent years, finally companies are catching up and starting to use this. 

00:05:42 Matija Kovac 

This is just one part of the entire translation process, so if you imagine how a client would work, their translation services within LSP, a lot of this is is what the translators. 

00:05:56 Matija Kovac 

We’re doing and this is now. 

00:05:57 Matija Kovac 

Finally being you. 

00:05:59 Matija Kovac 

Know speed up with with all these systems from neural machine translation, so translators can work fast. 

00:06:06 Matija Kovac 

But then there’s this whole part all around this that’s not done by translators or other vendors, but it’s actually done by project managers and administration and vendor managers and so on. 

00:06:18 Matija Kovac 

And this is something that, in my opinion, is also has a huge potential for automation. 

00:06:23 Matija Kovac 

We can. 

00:06:24 Matija Kovac 

We can make these things much faster. 

00:06:26 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So if you were to identify at a high level what areas are mature to be automated within the language services delivery space, what would they be? 

00:06:34 Matija Kovac 

Definitely, I think processing of files is something that we’re doing very well in our end. 

00:06:41 Matija Kovac 

I can’t speak for other competitors in the market, but it’s I. 

00:06:45 Matija Kovac 

I know this is something that our clients really like that when they drag and drop a file into the app immediately in seconds they get a fully analyzed document of a full analyzed report so they know exactly how much translation memory is. 

00:07:01 Matija Kovac 

Being used, how much are they going to? 

00:07:03 

Need to pay. 

00:07:03 Matija Kovac 

For the project, and even when it’s going to be delivered and this is one part that’s not automated with all the providers or most of them and something that works well for us. 

00:07:15 Matija Kovac 

This is something that our. 

00:07:16 Matija Kovac 

Clients like because it’s very intransparent. 

00:07:18 Matija Kovac 

They just drop the files and they immediately know how much it’s going to cost them and when they can expect it. 

00:07:24 Matija Kovac 

But then there’s other areas as well, like how you manage the project, how you manage your vendors, how you manage your administration. 

00:07:31 Matija Kovac 

We have a lot of already in place, but still there’s a long road ahead of us. 

00:07:36 Matija Kovac 

Of what else we can? 

00:07:37 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Automate so please explain how do you see applying automation and the project management models that most translation companies use today? 

00:07:46 Matija Kovac 

Well, this is so. 

00:07:48 

I I don’t want to. 

00:07:50 Matija Kovac 

I explained too much. 

00:07:51 Matija Kovac 

Maybe I would give away some some company secrets. 

00:07:55 Speaker 1 

But one thing we’re. 

00:07:56 Matija Kovac 

Looking at is predictions on which translators are most likely to accept a job and are going to also perform well on this job. 

00:08:06 Matija Kovac 

And this is the part where we’re looking into. 

00:08:08 Matija Kovac 

How to automate? 

00:08:10 Matija Kovac 

We don’t have this fully solved yet, but it’s definitely an interesting area. 

00:08:15 Matija Kovac 

For us, because you lose even less time by allocating a job to the right translator. 

00:08:21 Matija Kovac 

If you are able to predict whether or not they will be available or not for this task. 

00:08:27 Matija Kovac 

But then there’s other stuff also in the vendor management process, because when you start onboarding thousands upon thousands of vendors, there are certain tasks that could be automated and speed up in order to make sure that you are working with the right people at the right time, right? 

00:08:45 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So when it comes to production models, uh, there are so many things that can be automated. 

00:08:51 Sultan Ghaznawi 

It’s not just simply the task of. 

00:08:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

For example, the handing off and handing back in of the work. 

00:08:59 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Can you elaborate a little bit on what specific activities have you been managed to successfully automate? 

00:09:05 Matija Kovac 

Oh, that’s a it’s. 

00:09:06 Matija Kovac 

A difficult question because there’s so many little little points there, so many different things we do, and there’s so much more we have planned still, but how? 

00:09:19 Matija Kovac 

How to go about this? 

00:09:20 Matija Kovac 

Well, definitely one thing that. 

00:09:24 Matija Kovac 

Saves us a bunch of time and our clients really appreciate is the full or not. 

00:09:29 Matija Kovac 

Needed updating of translation memories depending on what’s going on with the project, so our PM doesn’t have to do as much work on gathering the right teams and and cleaning up those teams and and pushing them back into the system. 

00:09:45 Matija Kovac 

This part is mostly, if not entirely automated. 

00:09:49 Matija Kovac 

In our case. 

00:09:50 Matija Kovac 

So as long as we handle the process inside our platform, which means that everything is translated, revised and proof read inside our ecosystem that the teams are going to follow this entirely automatically and you can see it all in different stages. 

00:10:07 Matija Kovac 

So there’s quite quite a big advantage here. 

00:10:10 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So this is the type of automation that happens behind the scenes where a PM, for example clicks a button and then something happens and the the system comes back with some sort of error. 

00:10:21 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Now, do you know if our industry has implemented robotic process automation or RPA for sure to automate mundane project management or vendor management activities? 

00:10:30 Matija Kovac 

I’m not familiar with this expression, though I don’t think it’s very common in our industry. 

00:10:35 Matija Kovac 

It’s more common in in manufacturing industries. 

00:10:39 Matija Kovac 

If I’m not mistaken and so. 

00:10:41 Matija Kovac 

Would you mind maybe? 

00:10:43 Matija Kovac 

Explaining a bit more what what kind of tasks do you have in mind? 

00:10:48 Matija Kovac 

That could be. 

00:10:49 Matija Kovac 

Be performed by by this sort of process automation. 

00:10:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Well, as far as I’m familiar with the RPA, it’s a software based automation where you can actually tell the software this automation software what to do with the user interface of another software. 

00:11:05 Sultan Ghaznawi 

For example, you can teach it to check my email, check new orders from customers. 

00:11:10 Sultan Ghaznawi 

If an email looks like this is this is an order from a customer. 

00:11:13 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Read it and log it into this uh ERP system that I have and from there I identify the language and from the language. 

00:11:23 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Obviously the ERP will give you a list of. 

00:11:25 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Vendors and these are my top five vendors. 

00:11:28 Sultan Ghaznawi 

For example, sending email to these top five vendors for that specific language and by the time you come in the morning, most of the work is done for you. 

00:11:37 Sultan Ghaznawi 

It’s as if the software replaced one of the project managers who would be doing all of this, clicking back and forth. 

00:11:44 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I haven’t implemented this. 

00:11:45 Sultan Ghaznawi 

But I have a deep interest in RPA. 

00:11:48 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Is this something you’re familiar with? 

00:11:50 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Do you think that it has a place for automation in our industry? 

00:11:54 Matija Kovac 

Definitely has. 

00:11:55 Matija Kovac 

Like any industry in these days in our industry is not secure from automation. 

00:12:01 Matija Kovac 

In fact, it’s much needed because there’s still so much manual work going on. 

00:12:07 Matija Kovac 

And yeah, but I think what you just mentioned, it definitely covers part of what we already do. 

00:12:12 Matija Kovac 

It’s tier and even other companies. 

00:12:14 Matija Kovac 

Do it successfully. 

00:12:15 Matija Kovac 

And it can be extended even further. 

00:12:17 Matija Kovac 

So one way to go about this is by building different integrations into different systems. 

00:12:23 Matija Kovac 

So so one thing we do, for example, is we connect with our clients. 

00:12:28 Matija Kovac 

Databases or ERP systems or or E commerce platforms or whatever they’re using to manage their content and when they require a certain type of translation, they, or even if they just like input a new product description, it would automatically be sent. 

00:12:48 Matija Kovac 

Over the API. 

00:12:49 Matija Kovac 

Integration to our system and our system would analyze it and depending on what the language combination is and what the type of content is, a different type of service would be ordered. 

00:13:01 Matija Kovac 

In some cases you would go with a full on translation, editing and proofreading. 

00:13:06 Matija Kovac 

In some cases you would go with something faster and cheaper because you don’t have such high requirements. 

00:13:11 Matija Kovac 

And when we. 

00:13:12 Matija Kovac 

Are done on our end with the process. 

00:13:14 Matija Kovac 

So basically when the translator is done with the project and the PM checks the file the the the the project in Arc C Desk complete, it’s automatically sent back. 

00:13:25 Matija Kovac 

Via API to the clients platform formatted correctly and already available on their website or whatever they’re using. 

00:13:33 Matija Kovac 

So this is. 

00:13:35 Matija Kovac 

Like basic API integrations were not so basic. 

00:13:38 Matija Kovac 

It gets kind of complex. 

00:13:40 Matija Kovac 

You go deeper into it. 

00:13:42 Speaker 1 

But we’re a. 

00:13:43 Matija Kovac 

Lot of us in the industry and specifically as a tier we do a lot of this on a daily basis with a bunch of clients, and there’s more of this and the demand is definitely growing. 

00:13:53 Matija Kovac 

So this is something we’re seeing already, but but you were mentioning is something even more general. 

00:13:58 Matija Kovac 

It’s like, uh, including the you’re probably familiar with Zapier and similar tools that are very easy to use for day-to-day users. 

00:14:07 Matija Kovac 

Something like that right? 

00:14:08 Matija Kovac 

And integration with separate it was allowing you to set up a basic bots. 

00:14:13 Matija Kovac 

That’s going to do something. 

00:14:14 Matija Kovac 

Depending on what you 

00:14:16 Matija Kovac 

Put the parameters sign right. 

00:14:19 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So I mentioned vendor management. 

00:14:22 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Speaking of which, it is in an area where there’s a lot of repeat and mundane work which can and should be automated in my opinion. 

00:14:30 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How do you see automation providing value in the supply chain process? 

00:14:35 Matija Kovac 

Well, one thing it does is. 

00:14:37 Matija Kovac 

It brings down the cost, so it style. 

00:14:40 Matija Kovac 

We’re all about lean development. 

00:14:44 Matija Kovac 

Don’t do costs that are not required so we can keep the prices competitive and we can keep growing in. 

00:14:51 Matija Kovac 

The market and by keeping our costs down, we can keep the costs down for our clients. 

00:14:56 Matija Kovac 

So by automating a lot of. 

00:14:58 Matija Kovac 

Our work we we keep it more affordable to our clients and therefore everyone wins, right? 

00:15:05 Speaker 1 

Right? 

00:15:05 Matija Kovac 

And and in the end if we don’t need 10 vendor managers but only need 2. 

00:15:11 Matija Kovac 

To manage the same team of vendors and the same number of newly on boarded vendors, we’ve all one right? 

00:15:18 Matija Kovac 

It’s it’s better for everyone and even our vendors are happier be given and their managers are happier because they can focus on. 

00:15:26 Matija Kovac 

Better tasks they don’t have to do. 

00:15:28 Matija Kovac 

Click and repeat monkey jobs. 

00:15:30 Matija Kovac 

They can do more interesting things and actually put their time into working with the people that they’re onboarding, right? 

00:15:37 Matija Kovac 

So they develop relationships and all that. 

00:15:39 Matija Kovac 

So this I think this is the whole point of automation actually, not only in our industry, but in the in the. 

00:15:46 Matija Kovac 

Global idea of automation as a whole was supposed to be not to take people jobs, but to make people jobs more interesting so we can work on the stuff where humans are actually needed and leave the stuff that’s not interest. 

00:16:03 Matija Kovac 

Getting to us to robots or computers or however you. 

00:16:07 Matija Kovac 

Want to call them and? 

00:16:09 Matija Kovac 

In vendor management, of course you can do. 

00:16:10 Matija Kovac 

A lot of things you can. 

00:16:12 Matija Kovac 

You can do testing partly automated. 

00:16:15 Matija Kovac 

You can do data collection and sorting and inputting, partly automated and even. 

00:16:21 Matija Kovac 

All the way down to similarly. 

00:16:23 Matija Kovac 

What you do in digital marketing where you have fully automated campaigns and a lot of times users are not even aware of that? 

00:16:30 Matija Kovac 

You could even. 

00:16:31 Matija Kovac 

Go so far and build relations with your vendors on that level it. 

00:16:37 Matija Kovac 

I don’t prefer that, but technically. 

00:16:39 Matija Kovac 

It’s totally do. 

00:16:40 Matija Kovac 

All right? 

00:16:41 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Absolutely now Mattia we talked about the value that automation presents to the language company side of things. 

00:16:51 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Now can you please talk about how automating things in vendor management and project management improve the experience for translators and interpreters you touched upon that briefly? 

00:17:02 Sultan Ghaznawi 

But can you elaborate a little bit? 

00:17:04 Speaker 1 

One thing we we. 

00:17:06 Matija Kovac 

Do that Tyler is that we keep everything in the same ecosystem. 

00:17:08 Matija Kovac 

So if you imagine previously translators would need to either buy their own software or they would be provided with a copy of the software by the LSP that they’re working with and a lot of times vendors, translators, proofreaders and so on. 

00:17:24 Matija Kovac 

Are freelancers who work from home or from a coworking space or something like that, and for them, keeping up with the new tech and keeping keeping their software updated and having ten different cat tools to use with ten different agencies? 

00:17:42 Matija Kovac 

That they work with. 

00:17:44 Matija Kovac 

Is probably a burden that’s one thing, and the other thing is, it’s also highly insecure, so when you as a client send your files via email to your local agency, and that agency sends those files via email to the local translator and then translator works in their pajamas. 

00:18:04 Matija Kovac 

On a 10 year old laptop that they don’t regularly update and keep secure, probably in a public cafe or something like that, your files are not secure. 

00:18:16 Matija Kovac 

Not anymore. 

00:18:16 Matija Kovac 

Not at that state. 

00:18:18 Matija Kovac 

When we needed tires, we streamlined the whole process so everything the translators have to do is part of our platform. 

00:18:25 Matija Kovac 

It’s inside the same ecosystem, so they don’t have to download the files. 

00:18:29 Matija Kovac 

They don’t have to store them on their hard drives and they get to work in a cloud system in a cloud platform. 

00:18:38 Matija Kovac 

Is always up to date and very fast and allows them to work much better than they would. 

00:18:44 Matija Kovac 

Without decent cats too or without any help from automation. 

00:18:49 Matija Kovac 

By our measurements they are usually capable of working up to three to four times faster than they would translate it manually. 

00:18:58 Matija Kovac 

So if you make a regular business document, which is something we do on a daily basis. 

00:19:05 Matija Kovac 

And that’s not very creative. 

00:19:07 Matija Kovac 

Copy just the contractor, something that has to get done on a daily basis and has a lot of repetitive content we can with this level of automation with teams and teams and all of that help them to translate much faster. 

00:19:21 Matija Kovac 

So for translators this is good because we pay them by the word. 

00:19:24 Matija Kovac 

We don’t pay them by the. 

00:19:25 Matija Kovac 

Hour and they can. 

00:19:27 Matija Kovac 

Work much more. 

00:19:28 Matija Kovac 

Efficiently this way. 

00:19:29 Matija Kovac 

In a system that’s always kept up to date for them and is always secure so they don’t have to burden themselves with security and all those issues. 

00:19:38 Matija Kovac 

This is 1 aspect, but there’s probably more. 

00:19:41 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Switching gears, a little material here. 

00:19:44 Sultan Ghaznawi 

We’ve talked about the the translation process and obviously what value automation can present on to both sides, the supply and the buyer side. 

00:19:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Now automation and sales function has been a long running offering. 

00:19:56 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I mean Salesforce and others. 

00:19:58 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Have done a great job. 

00:20:00 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How do you see sales automation creating value for translation companies? 

00:20:03 Matija Kovac 

Prod, that’s a. 

00:20:05 Matija Kovac 

That’s a very complex question. 

00:20:07 Matija Kovac 

And what I’d like. 

00:20:08 Matija Kovac 

To say, see some answers to as well. 

00:20:10 Matija Kovac 

So anyone out there is listening to this we we would love some experienced people. 

00:20:16 Matija Kovac 

Help us with our marketing and our sales because it’s not that we’re not doing well, but we can always do better and I love to learn new stuff. 

00:20:25 Matija Kovac 

And here I think I’m I met him at my. 

00:20:28 

At the end of. 

00:20:29 Matija Kovac 

My rope when it comes to my skills for for sales automation so, but let me let me try to walk you. 

00:20:34 Matija Kovac 

Briefly, through what? 

00:20:35 Matija Kovac 

We do we we. 

00:20:37 

Try to. 

00:20:39 Matija Kovac 

Run marketing campaigns that are very targeted and we try to automate a lot of the lead generation process and and all of that. 

00:20:49 Matija Kovac 

That’s going on and therefore deliver higher value leads directly to our sales team. 

00:20:56 Matija Kovac 

So one thing we try to do. 

00:20:58 Matija Kovac 

Is to keep our sales team occupied with warm leads and not get them to do cold calling so. 

00:21:06 Matija Kovac 

So much and there that’s how they can convert better and work with people and invest their time into people who are actually interested in our product and are actually interested in changing their language, service provider or whatever that they’re using at this stage. 

00:21:24 Matija Kovac 

That said, it’s a. 

00:21:26 Matija Kovac 

Very complex industry. 

00:21:28 Matija Kovac 

It’s extremely fragmented. 

00:21:30 Matija Kovac 

You’re going to find clients who. 

00:21:32 Matija Kovac 

Have 5000 or more employees and don’t have a translation or localization system in place, even though they should. 

00:21:41 Matija Kovac 

But on the other hand, you. 

00:21:42 Matija Kovac 

Might find very small startups who are very very well educated when it comes to localization and have dedicated teams localization managers. 

00:21:53 Matija Kovac 

They already have their software. 

00:21:56 Matija Kovac 

Place and for us it’s kind of one of the major issues at this point, and I’ll be honest about it. 

00:22:01 Matija Kovac 

Is finding the right type of client because we work with both very small companies and huge multinationals. 

00:22:09 Matija Kovac 

We work with companies in very modern software as a service or tech industry or. 

00:22:15 Matija Kovac 

Something like that. 

00:22:16 Matija Kovac 

But a lot of times we works with very traditional clients like manufacturing companies and so on. 

00:22:24 Matija Kovac 

And it’s it’s really like there’s no safe spot to say this is exactly our client, and that’s how we can automate the sales. 

00:22:33 Matija Kovac 

To to get them. 

00:22:34 Matija Kovac 

This is something we’re quite honestly still struggling with. 

00:22:37 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Let’s switch gears. 

00:22:39 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Again, a little bit and talk about automating management processes and reporting analytics if you will. 

00:22:45 Sultan Ghaznawi 

This is an area I think that almost every industry is mature in terms of getting some degree of automation done. 

00:22:52 Sultan Ghaznawi 

What are your thoughts? 

00:22:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

First thing. 

00:22:54 Matija Kovac 

You need to do is gather your data. 

00:22:56 Matija Kovac 

That’s that. 

00:22:57 Matija Kovac 

That’s something we had to work around as well. 

00:22:59 Matija Kovac 

So even though we try to keep everything in the same platform, there’s still, you know, marketing runs in five different tools. 

00:23:07 Matija Kovac 

Sales uses 4 different tools. 

00:23:09 Matija Kovac 

Some other teams use other tools, so you need to usually what you would do is either find tools that can be connected well and go with something simple, like for example we use Google Data studio because it’s free. 

00:23:25 Matija Kovac 

It’s easy to set up and it connects with a bunch of things. 

00:23:29 Matija Kovac 

And it allows us to build interactive dashboards where we can find our all of our numbers on our KPIs. 

00:23:35 Matija Kovac 

All important statistics in the blink of. 

00:23:39 Matija Kovac 

An eye for the. 

00:23:40 Matija Kovac 

Entire company and we’ve set this up in recent months and working very well. 

00:23:44 Matija Kovac 

For us, but the next stage is definitely going to build a decent data warehouse to to go with a proper VI tool. 

00:23:52 Matija Kovac 

That’s going to help you to analyze. 

00:23:53 Matija Kovac 

Things much better. 

00:23:54 Matija Kovac 

And to make. 

00:23:57 Matija Kovac 

Data driven decisions right? 

00:23:58 Matija Kovac 

Because we are in. 

00:24:00 Matija Kovac 

The era where sorry. 

00:24:03 Matija Kovac 

Excuse me 

00:24:04 Matija Kovac 

We’re in the era where you need to make decisions very, very carefully and selectively otherwise. 

00:24:11 Matija Kovac 

You can end up with wrong decisions and in this day and age with such a competitive and fast evolving market that can be very costly. 

00:24:20 Matija Kovac 

So yeah, data driven. 

00:24:23 Matija Kovac 

Make sure you have your your your data stored and prepared correctly and then go. 

00:24:31 Matija Kovac 

Into analyzing it. 

00:24:33 Matija Kovac 

When it comes to reporting, I am a big fan of automated reporting. 

00:24:38 Matija Kovac 

The one thing I hate most is when you’re working in a corporation and you spend half of your day preparing reports for your middle management senior management, that usually no one ever reads because they’re too busy making their own reports for their. 

00:24:53 Matija Kovac 

Middle management. 

00:24:54 Matija Kovac 

And so on and so forth up the chain. 

00:24:57 Matija Kovac 

So this is something we definitely still can’t avoid at this stage, because we’re still a very small company, but I hope we can avoid it also in the future and keep. 

00:25:07 Matija Kovac 

Of reporting and data gathering. 

00:25:11 Matija Kovac 

Automate it as much as possible. 

00:25:13 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Besides productivity gains material, what else can automation offer to translation companies? 

00:25:19 Matija Kovac 

It’s not only about productivity and keeping. 

00:25:24 Matija Kovac 

Costs and time. 

00:25:26 Matija Kovac 

Required low, it’s also about increasing quality, right? 

00:25:29 Matija Kovac 

So very. 

00:25:31 Matija Kovac 

Old technologies back in 90s or even sooner, maybe already allowed for translation memories to be used and to help they keep things more consistent across the board. 

00:25:45 Matija Kovac 

So if you have multiple translators working on similar projects, sharing a common translation memory. 

00:25:51 Matija Kovac 

Can help them work more consistently and provide a more consistent. 

00:25:57 Matija Kovac 

Inflation, but in in recent years with the rise of AI and neural networks, what we see is also a huge potential in helping translators find better ways to express something or helping them keep the grammar correct and not only that, but also. 

00:26:17 Matija Kovac 

Come up with creative new ways of saying things and by gathering all of this data with this new new class of AI with through a transformer. 

00:26:29 Matija Kovac 

Of course you can also generate a bunch of cool content we’ve all seen last year. 

00:26:35 Matija Kovac 

What GPT 3 did does a very impressive new cover to the industry, but even from here on there’s there’s already talk about way more sophisticated models that are going to help not only translate. 

00:26:49 Matija Kovac 

Also generate content or recreate it if you want read. 

00:26:55 Matija Kovac 

How’s it called again transcription right? 

00:26:58 Speaker 2 

This podcast is made possible with sponsorship from hybrid links, a human in the loop provider of translation and data collection services for healthcare, education, legal and government sectors. Visithybridlinks.com to learn more. 

00:27:08 Sultan Ghaznawi 

2nd, so that represents an opportunity for even new sub industries or subsectors to form or then the translation and localization industry talk to me about some of these. 

00:27:23 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Where do you see automation playing a role? 

00:27:26 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I mean, if we’re talking about neural Nets. 

00:27:29 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Machine learning in general. 

00:27:30 Sultan Ghaznawi 

What type of opportunities it presents for translation companies to reformulate what they’re doing and offer a business solution. 

00:27:37 Matija Kovac 

We’ve already seen this in the market in the last year. Some of the existing LSP’s already started also working on data annotation services. 

00:27:46 Matija Kovac 

So when when you have a bunch of data that someone needs to label and make sure that it can be used for for training the new AI. 

00:27:56 Matija Kovac 

And since a lot of this data is. 

00:27:59 Matija Kovac 

Usually informal texts and you have LSPS. 

00:28:02 Matija Kovac 

On the other hand who already have an army of freelance series already working with them and they have all these processes in place. 

00:28:09 Matija Kovac 

They are quite for. 

00:28:11 Matija Kovac 

For now, speed might be quite a good way to pivot into something like this, and we’ve seen cases of this in the last. 

00:28:19 Matija Kovac 

But there’s like you said yourself, with the growing industry and growing technology, there’s new niche products coming in that weren’t even. 

00:28:31 Matija Kovac 

Available a few years ago and I’m really excited to see what else companies are going to come up with and what new business models can be evolved out of this. 

00:28:40 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How do you? 

00:28:41 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Implement a vision that’s based on a combination of manpower and automation. 

00:28:46 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Where does this thinking come from? 

00:28:48 Matija Kovac 

I think this there’s there’s. 

00:28:51 Matija Kovac 

Been a lot of. 

00:28:52 Matija Kovac 

Talk and a lot of hatred going on against automation. 

00:28:56 Matija Kovac 

In in our industry specifically, but in other industries as well, and as I mentioned previously, I think the whole point of automation is to to make human lives more meaningful. 

00:29:07 Matija Kovac 

And we’ve been doing it since the Neolithic since we started settling down and becoming a civilized society. 

00:29:14 Matija Kovac 

We’ve always found ways to make our work. 

00:29:18 Matija Kovac 

Our labor less intensive and made tools and made other things that help us and essentially I see. 

00:29:25 Matija Kovac 

AI’s and automation is just another tool that’s going to help us do things. It’s a very revolutionary tool, but so was the wheel, and so was the steam engine, and they made a lot of people to have to change their lives. But you can’t stop this. There’s no way you can. You can stop this sort of technology. 

00:29:46 Matija Kovac 

From being developed if. 

00:29:48 Matija Kovac 

We are not going. 

00:29:49 Matija Kovac 

To develop it, someone else is going. 

00:29:51 Matija Kovac 

To if if people who. 

00:29:52 Matija Kovac 

Have moral standards or high moral standards are not the ones working on this. 

00:29:58 Matija Kovac 

Someone with lower more standards is going. 

00:30:00 Matija Kovac 

To and they’re going to. 

00:30:01 Matija Kovac 

Rockhead work even worse, so we we need to embrace it. 

00:30:05 Matija Kovac 

We need to learn about it, not be afraid of it and find ways how to adapt our lives to to. 

00:30:11 Matija Kovac 

Work with it. 

00:30:12 Matija Kovac 

There’s no other way around it, right? 

00:30:14 Matija Kovac 

And we’ve seen this going. 

00:30:16 Matija Kovac 

This process has been faster and faster and faster in recent years and generations. 

00:30:23 Matija Kovac 

But All in all, I think it’s we run on the brink of a very new era where a lot of our jobs are going to change dramatically and some for the better. 

00:30:36 Matija Kovac 

Some for the worse. 

00:30:37 Matija Kovac 

I guess some jobs that exist today are not even going to exist in 20 years. 

00:30:42 Matija Kovac 

But it’s the same thing if you look 20 years back jobs from 20 years ago don’t exist anymore. 

00:30:48 Matija Kovac 

No one fixes fax machines, right? 

00:30:51 Matija Kovac 

They don’t exist, they’re out of date and. 

00:30:54 Matija Kovac 

We we need to learn how. 

00:30:57 Matija Kovac 

To live with that, it’s just that thing. 

00:30:58 Matija Kovac 

So if there’s a piece of advice, Start learning. 

00:31:02 Matija Kovac 

Start researching. 

00:31:04 Matija Kovac 

Don’t be afraid to delve deep into this technology because it’s not as scary as it seems. 

00:31:11 Matija Kovac 

On the surface. 

00:31:12 Matija Kovac 

And for God’s sake, make your children go study computer science or something because. 

00:31:17 Matija Kovac 

We are in high demand of developers and engineers as a society in whole. 

00:31:21 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Absolutely yeah. 

00:31:23 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So just to add to your comment, I think as an industry we also have a responsibility to to make people aware of what technology and automation is and and that they shouldn’t be scared. 

00:31:34 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I mean some of our mega conferences without naming any of them. 

00:31:38 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Keep talking about the low level implementation of. 

00:31:41 Sultan Ghaznawi 

For example, different types of algorithms without telling people what. 

00:31:44 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Business cases can be created from these new technologies and unfortunately everyone is talking about the how not not a lot of people are talking about the what like what can we sell, what these new possibilities available. 

00:31:58 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So anyway that leads to my next question in order to implement automation, do you think? 

00:32:05 Sultan Ghaznawi 

It’s necessary to bring outside help in the form of consultants or other people who are familiar with the automation technologies. 

00:32:12 Matija Kovac 

Well, it really depends on the resources the company has, so a very large company is most likely going to look into acquiring a smaller competitor who has this kind of. 

00:32:22 Matija Kovac 

R&D development already established and has this kind of convergence kind of engineering already available. A much smaller company probably can’t even afford building their own technologies, so they’re going to have to outsource it to a consultant and and outsource it to existing software in the market. And somewhere in the middle. 

00:32:42 Matija Kovac 

You can most likely go into developing partially your own custom solutions, but those can be extremely expensive. 

00:32:50 Matija Kovac 

And yeah, going with the help of some advisors in our case, we obviously our goal is to develop technology that we can then use and also sell onwards. 

00:33:01 Matija Kovac 

So we have our own development team. 

00:33:03 Matija Kovac 

We work very closely on doing this ourselves. 

00:33:09 Matija Kovac 

And keeping the knowledge in house but when necessary, we’re not afraid of engaging with advisors who are much more experienced than we are, and might even bring us a lot more new knowledge to to to our games so. 

00:33:24 Matija Kovac 

Yeah, that’s there’s. 

00:33:25 Matija Kovac 

There’s no best way to do it. 

00:33:27 Matija Kovac 

You know, it really depends on on what what the issue is and what are your resources. 

00:33:32 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Let’s let’s take a look at our industry. 

00:33:35 Sultan Ghaznawi 

From the outside. 

00:33:36 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Are there examples of organizations that you know of in our industry that have successfully adopted automation and and if so, in your opinion, what type of gains are they reporting? 

00:33:48 Matija Kovac 

I I think there are a. 

00:33:49 Matija Kovac 

Lot of them. 

00:33:50 Matija Kovac 

I mean there’s so much going on in in in our industry in recent years. 

00:33:54 Matija Kovac 

If you just look at the number of mergers and acquisitions in the last year when it was a COVID year and and. 

00:34:01 Matija Kovac 

I know a lot of things were stuck because of all the lock downs, but there were over, I think €8 billion of worth of transactions and about 39 different mergers and acquisitions going on. So this definitely shows that the market is very very vibrant when it comes to. 

00:34:20 Matija Kovac 

Acquiring new technology or acquiring competitors. 

00:34:24 Matija Kovac 

So I think what’s what’s happening in in a list in my opinion. 

00:34:29 Matija Kovac 

Is the older players who have been on the market for a longer period of time and are very big and and well spread. 

00:34:37 Matija Kovac 

Don’t have such a good insight into what the technology is capable of or haven’t been up to date. 

00:34:44 Matija Kovac 

Haven’t been evolving as fast as they should to keep up with the recent technological developments. 

00:34:50 Matija Kovac 

So how they’re compensating for is is that they’re acquiring younger companies who are more technically. 

00:34:57 Matija Kovac 

Versatile and who knew how to handle all these new technologies out there? 

00:35:02 Matija Kovac 

So it’s it’s kind. 

00:35:03 Matija Kovac 

Of an opportunity. 

00:35:05 Matija Kovac 

For both of them. 

00:35:06 Matija Kovac 

On the one hand, big players can stay up to date by acquiring younger players who have this technology, and for younger players it’s a good way. 

00:35:16 Matija Kovac 

To consider as an exit strategy I guess. 

00:35:19 Sultan Ghaznawi 

We talked about this in general terms earlier, but what about artificial intelligence and automation? 

00:35:25 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I mean, you can automate things using rules. 

00:35:28 Sultan Ghaznawi 

And heuristics, but AI completely introduces a new paradigm. 

00:35:32 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Here I’m guessing machine learning can introduce a different dimension and the automation concept altogether. 

00:35:38 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How do we prepare or even pioneer such solutions? 

00:35:41 

But in in. 

00:35:42 Matija Kovac 

A large way we already do right? So the what the one thing that we’ve mentioned previously is the shift from statistical machine translation engines to neural machine translation engines, whereas like it only happened in the last five years, they didn’t even exist back before 2016. Neural machine. 

00:36:01 Matija Kovac 

Translation wasn’t even a thing. 

00:36:03 Matija Kovac 

And now I mean if if you remember. 

00:36:06 Matija Kovac 

Google Translate was a joke to a lot of people and sometimes still it’s, but the the quality of engines like that. 

00:36:15 Matija Kovac 

This is just the most famous one or or infamous. 

00:36:18 Matija Kovac 

However you want it. 

00:36:20 Matija Kovac 

It has grown tremendously and I think what’s happening is that the buying since the content is growing so faster there’s huge huge. 

00:36:33 Matija Kovac 

Loads and loads of new content being generated on. 

00:36:36 Matija Kovac 

A daily basis. 

00:36:37 Matija Kovac 

And with the availability of localising this content there. 

00:36:43 Matija Kovac 

Will be the. 

00:36:44 Matija Kovac 

Demand of localising it because it’s cheaper than any time in the past to translate it. 

00:36:49 Matija Kovac 

So what’s going to happen is that even though automation is going to take over. 

00:36:56 Matija Kovac 

A lot of the. 

00:37:00 Matija Kovac 

It’s going to take over the parts that are that wouldn’t even get localized before. 

00:37:06 Matija Kovac 

The parts that. 

00:37:07 Matija Kovac 

Even didn’t even exist, like new content that’s popping up. 

00:37:10 Matija Kovac 

Over the Internet. 

00:37:12 Matija Kovac 

On a daily basis and stuff that was traditionally translated by LSP’s and other providers. 

00:37:19 Matija Kovac 

Is still going to get. 

00:37:20 Matija Kovac 

Sold if you if you. 

00:37:21 Matija Kovac 

I think let’s say legal documents you you will probably not going to come. 

00:37:28 Matija Kovac 

Leave Google Translate to translate your entire mortgage contract with your bank for your house, right? 

00:37:36 Matija Kovac 

You probably want to have that translated correct or whatever it is. 

00:37:39 Matija Kovac 

Whatever legal document you need, same goes with the user manuals, for example. 

00:37:44 Matija Kovac 

If you are. 

00:37:45 Matija Kovac 

Producing a forklift and your translations are. 

00:37:48 Matija Kovac 

Are done with Google Translate and that forklift is going to murder someone on some work place. 

00:37:54 Matija Kovac 

Then you will get into trouble, so that’s where you will invest into human in the loop. 

00:38:00 Matija Kovac 

Sort of translation, and this is where we come in. 

00:38:03 Matija Kovac 

So we we provide both. 

00:38:05 Matija Kovac 

We allow our clients to select themselves and this is the part I love the most. 

00:38:10 Matija Kovac 

Because in in the old days. 

00:38:13 Matija Kovac 

The agency would be the one telling you what kind of quality you need. 

00:38:17 Matija Kovac 

It’s the other way around. 

00:38:18 Matija Kovac 

We let the clients decide what kind of quality. 

00:38:21 Matija Kovac 

They they need. 

00:38:22 Matija Kovac 

In what their budget allows for? 

00:38:24 Matija Kovac 

And this is how automation then. 

00:38:27 Matija Kovac 

Steps into all parts of the game. 

00:38:29 Matija Kovac 

You can go full on. 

00:38:30 Matija Kovac 

Automate it if that’s what you need, or you can go but partly automated, but still with a human in the loop process. 

00:38:37 Matija Kovac 

And go with that, and for me that’s the way it should be. 

00:38:40 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Let’s talk about some of the negative implications that automation presents or causes. 

00:38:47 Sultan Ghaznawi 

We know that automation can reduce manual labor because obviously it’s taking away all that repetitive type of work. 

00:38:55 Sultan Ghaznawi 

What else can it affect? 

00:38:56 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Do you think that there are implications with regards to quality with regards to acceptance? 

00:39:01 Sultan Ghaznawi 

And any other areas? 

00:39:02 Matija Kovac 

Definitely I. 

00:39:03 Matija Kovac 

I think one of the main issues we’re we’re going to get into, and we’re already seeing it is over reliance on automation. 

00:39:10 Matija Kovac 

As automation gets good and better and better. 

00:39:14 Matija Kovac 

We tend to rely more often on it, right? 

00:39:18 Matija Kovac 

I I remember a very common case was with self driving cars when, uh, I think it was Google who had one of the first self driving cars and they gave it to a bunch of people and told them to use it. 

00:39:32 Matija Kovac 

But they need to keep their hands on the wheel. 

00:39:34 Matija Kovac 

At all times, similarly, what you have to do in your Tesla still right? 

00:39:39 Matija Kovac 

And they put cameras in the car. 

00:39:41 Matija Kovac 

As well and in the first few hours, people were still holding hands on the steering group because they were not sure if the car is going to do the right thing. 

00:39:50 Matija Kovac 

But after a day or two driving around in a car that does everything perfectly and never kills you, you sit down and you relax and now you have all these videos on the Internet of people using. 

00:40:02 Matija Kovac 

Could literally sleep in their driver seat and let the car do everything for them, and that is a problem because technology doesn’t matter which level we’re talking about either. 

00:40:15 Matija Kovac 

Is it self driving cars who might get very very dangerous and kill people? 

00:40:20 Matija Kovac 

Or if it’s translation services? 

00:40:23 Matija Kovac 

Is you know it it’s it can always be flawed, just like humans can always be flawed. 

00:40:27 Matija Kovac 

So is technology we should not over rely on some things. 

00:40:31 Matija Kovac 

Especially in such early stages of this technology and we see a similar thing with translations. 

00:40:37 Matija Kovac 

When you, when we measure the distance from our translators, do the better the machine translation output, it’s the lower the distance that they do when they translate something, so they they get presented with a pre translated. 

00:40:51 Matija Kovac 

Piece of content which they compare with the original segment and if it’s more or less correct, they’re less inclined to fix it because it’s more or less. 

00:41:00 Matija Kovac 

Correct and we can see that the the level of engagement on the human side then starts dropping, so they would. 

00:41:09 Matija Kovac 

It’s it’s very easy to let a mistake slip this way because you don’t see it because you rely so. 

00:41:16 Matija Kovac 

Much on the empty. 

00:41:17 Matija Kovac 

You just go OK. 

00:41:18 Matija Kovac 

This is fine. 

00:41:18 Matija Kovac 

Move on to the next segment. 

00:41:20 Matija Kovac 

This looks fine. 

00:41:21 Matija Kovac 

Move on to the next segment and then you just skip it. 

00:41:23 Matija Kovac 

You just don’t see. 

00:41:24 Matija Kovac 

But there’s an error somewhere in the middle, right? 

00:41:27 Matija Kovac 

So there Overlines is going to be a. 

00:41:30 Matija Kovac 

Problem that we’re. 

00:41:31 Matija Kovac 

Going to have to work around still. 

00:41:32 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Well, I agree with you that we are quite some distance away from level 5A type of automation. We are still dealing with augmentation with humans now about implementing automation at organizations. Do they affect us on the client side? Of course. How do we respond to the need? 

00:41:52 Sultan Ghaznawi 

For being faster and more efficient as expected by algorithms implemented on our client side. 

00:41:58 Matija Kovac 

That’s a very complex question. 

00:42:01 Matija Kovac 

Uh, yeah there’s I think there’s only one way of going about it, so the the time is here to automate or to be left behind. 

00:42:10 Matija Kovac 

I think that the the players in the industry who will adopt new technologies and will follow the trends and will learn and and develop will be the ones surfing. 

00:42:21 Matija Kovac 

The new wave of automation and the ones who won’t will be left behind and the tsunami that’s coming is going to sweep them out. 

00:42:28 Matija Kovac 

So there’s no other way around it, I. 

00:42:31 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Think so, just to reformulate that question. 

00:42:33 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Let’s say if your client that has been sending you work for manual translation all of a sudden implement their own algorithms where as a supplier of translation services for example, or even in some cases, interpreting where would you add value now. 

00:42:48 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Because the way I see it, for example, if your client has some sort of a streaming service, and before that you had to translate the subtitles and now they’ve automated all of. 

00:42:56 Sultan Ghaznawi 

That, uh, I see an opportunity where you can actually do a handoff of automated transfer. 

00:43:04 Sultan Ghaznawi 

To your company when the content is dealing with something very specialized and you can just add value by correcting it, and by augmenting what their algorithm has done. 

00:43:14 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How do we go about doing that? 

00:43:16 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Where does an LSP pivot to or how do they pivot in order to make sure that they deliver the right type of? 

00:43:23 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Value, yeah. 

00:43:24 Matija Kovac 

So an LSP is quite definitely going to keep. 

00:43:29 Matija Kovac 

Being the human in the loop part. 

00:43:31 Matija Kovac 

So if if your client is is let’s like like you said your example. 

00:43:36 Matija Kovac 

Is really good. 

00:43:36 Matija Kovac 

You have a video content producer or a company that deals with that. 

00:43:41 Matija Kovac 

They need a lot of localization. 

00:43:42 Matija Kovac 

Previously, everything was done manually. 

00:43:44 Matija Kovac 

All the subtitling. 

00:43:45 Matija Kovac 

Now the transcriptions and a lot of the subtitling is already fully automated. 

00:43:50 Matija Kovac 

But it’s not perfect. 

00:43:51 Matija Kovac 

There’s still a need for the human group, at least for the next five years we we see it will still be there. 

00:43:58 Matija Kovac 

And depending on the type of content and the type of users who will engage with this content, probably even much further into the future. 

00:44:06 Matija Kovac 

So if if. 

00:44:07 Matija Kovac 

It’s a YouTube video more. 

00:44:10 Matija Kovac 

Most people are perfectly fine with the with the automated CC right, but there’s still some content where humans will always be present in the loop, so that’s where analysis we can place themselves. 

00:44:22 Matija Kovac 

The problem which I see here is the one that you mentioned. 

00:44:26 Matija Kovac 

If a client. 

00:44:27 Matija Kovac 

Were to do this on their end. 

00:44:29 Matija Kovac 

How do you then integrate with their system to make sure that you’re compliant on your system? 

00:44:34 Matija Kovac 

I look at it from the technical perspective because our. 

00:44:38 Matija Kovac 

It’s Kaya at our company. 

00:44:41 Matija Kovac 

Our paradigm is that we are the ones who provide the the the technology, weird ones who provide the platform for our users. 

00:44:48 Matija Kovac 

We are capable of integrating with a bunch of different systems, but we rather keep everything on our end and get the clients to use our platform. 

00:44:58 Matija Kovac 

So yeah, if if this were to happen to us, for example, if one of our clients and we do subtitling. 

00:45:03 Matija Kovac 

Of course, as. 

00:45:04 Matija Kovac 

Well, we were to decide to automate it on their end entirely and we were just. 

00:45:08 Matija Kovac 

A part of. 

00:45:09 Matija Kovac 

Their loop we could engage with them via an API and keep providing our human in the loop service. 

00:45:14 Matija Kovac 

Yes, but we will receive that they use our platform so. 

00:45:18 Matija Kovac 

We can keep. 

00:45:19 Matija Kovac 

Everything on our end. 

00:45:20 Matija Kovac 

It’s easier for everyone. 

00:45:22 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Yeah, that that would be an ideal scenario, but let’s talk about, uh, where do we go from here? 

00:45:27 Sultan Ghaznawi 

How does the next five year look like in embracing automation within localization industry? 

00:45:32 Matija Kovac 

Cool, that’s $1,000,000 question. 

00:45:34 

Or even more. 

00:45:35 Matija Kovac 

I I I’d love to give you an answer to that, but unfortunately I I don’t think I’m. 

00:45:41 Matija Kovac 

I’m well experienced enough for something like that. 

00:45:44 Matija Kovac 

So definitely what’s going on is the the automation is going to. 

00:45:48 Matija Kovac 

Take off a lot of work. 

00:45:51 Matija Kovac 

Users or companies who. 

00:45:54 Matija Kovac 

Didn’t didn’t use an empty. 

00:45:56 Matija Kovac 

Are definitely going to start using it. 

00:45:58 Matija Kovac 

New jobs are going to pop up as we already mentioned. 

00:46:02 Matija Kovac 

And I think the whole industry is about to to get shook over and and swept over by this tsunami of automation. 

00:46:11 Matija Kovac 

What the end game will be? 

00:46:12 Matija Kovac 

What will be the result of this? 

00:46:14 Matija Kovac 

I think a lot. 

00:46:15 Matija Kovac 

Of the players are going to go. 

00:46:16 Matija Kovac 

Extinct there will be even more mergers and acquisitions coming in. 

00:46:22 Matija Kovac 

A lot of. 

00:46:23 Matija Kovac 

The market will probably consolidate because it’s a very mature market, but it’s extremely fragmented, so it will probably start consolidating even more. 

00:46:34 Matija Kovac 

And we’re already seeing this trend in last years and whoever is not going to automate is just going to be left behind. 

00:46:41 Matija Kovac 

That’s basically the the point of this. 

00:46:43 Matija Kovac 

But we’re playing it. 

00:46:45 Sultan Ghaznawi 

So, so that being said, do you think our industry is prepared to adopt automation at the scale that we are about to see? 

00:46:53 Matija Kovac 

I don’t think any industry is prepared to see what what’s coming in the next five years. 

00:46:57 Matija Kovac 

When it comes to automation. 

00:46:59 Matija Kovac 

As I mentioned previously, just remember when GP came out, even GPT 2 imagine can you remember the type of content it was able to generate and then number three was even more and you know that we can’t even predict what would what AI will be able to do for us in five years. 

00:47:19 Matija Kovac 

It’s a it’s too far ahead for people who like myself who are not very, very specialized in this research. 

00:47:30 Matija Kovac 

We’re merely developers and consumers. 

00:47:32 Matija Kovac 

We’re not researchers. 

00:47:34 Matija Kovac 

And there’s quite a bit of a gap there. 

00:47:37 Matija Kovac 

I don’t think any industry is prepared for what’s going to come up. 

00:47:41 Matija Kovac 

It’s we’re all going to have to embrace it or fail, and I think some players are much more. 

00:47:51 Matija Kovac 

Much well versed in this technology and will be able to support their clients needs and support their their growth. 

00:48:00 Matija Kovac 

By using this technology but not everyone is going to be capable of doing this, obviously. 

00:48:06 Matija Kovac 

So yeah, industry is whole. 

00:48:08 Matija Kovac 

Definitely not some players sure. 

00:48:10 Matija Kovac 

Yeah, yes. 

00:48:12 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Matthew, what’s your message for our industry and and your peers? 

00:48:16 Sultan Ghaznawi 

What would you like to tell them about automation? 

00:48:18 Speaker 1 

Well, I I think. 

00:48:21 Matija Kovac 

We’ve talked a lot about automation. 

00:48:22 Matija Kovac 

We talked about how important it is to embrace the technology, how try not to be afraid of it outright? 

00:48:28 Matija Kovac 

Let’s try to work with it rather than against it, but I think in the end my. 

00:48:33 Matija Kovac 

Message should be that. 

00:48:35 Matija Kovac 

It’s not all about automation, it’s it doesn’t matter what kind of technology your company has. 

00:48:41 Matija Kovac 

If you don’t know how to work with your people. 

00:48:45 Matija Kovac 

If you don’t know how to work with your clients and present a decent human connection, there’s no way you can keep your company successful or or make it successful. 

00:48:55 Matija Kovac 

It’s, I think with all the automation coming in, it’s becoming even more important. 

00:49:01 Matija Kovac 

Come to focus on the human aspect of whatever business that we’re working on, and I honestly hope I sincerely hope that our generation will be able to. 

00:49:11 Matija Kovac 

On the one. 

00:49:12 Matija Kovac 

Hand embrace new technologies like AI to help us work faster and more efficiently. 

00:49:19 Matija Kovac 

But on the other hand, to also. 

00:49:21 Matija Kovac 

Leave more meaningful lives that will allow us to go in for deeper human connection and and work on more. 

00:49:30 Matija Kovac 

We call it culture in our company with with what we’re developing, but I think it’s. 

00:49:34 Matija Kovac 

More of a. 

00:49:36 Matija Kovac 

Mentality, even it’s it’s more of a mind. 

00:49:38 Matija Kovac 

I said so you you, you can find time to work with people and develop this deep relationship with them. 

00:49:44 Matija Kovac 

That’s not my idea here, so hopefully we’re going into this direction. 

00:49:50 Matija Kovac 

The other the other idea is just we’re going into a dystopia, but that would be more. 

00:49:55 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I think we don’t get their media. 

00:49:58 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I agree with you, automation is the future in so many ways, and, uh. 

00:50:02 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I think our industry is also jumping on this bandwagon and we must stay on top of the latest trends in this area so hopefully we can revisit this conversation again. 

00:50:11 Sultan Ghaznawi 

It was a pleasure speaking with you today and as I said, I’m hoping we can do this again in the future and have you in another episode where you can talk about automation and what’s happening with that. 

00:50:21 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I want to. 

00:50:21 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Thank you for your time. 

00:50:22 Matija Kovac 

Thank you Sultan, for having me. 

00:50:24 Matija Kovac 

This was a very engaging conversation and I hope. 

00:50:26 Matija Kovac 

We get to talk again soon. 

00:50:35 Sultan Ghaznawi 

That was a very interesting conversation with Metia. 

00:50:38 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I think he represents what our industry is undergoing at an early stage at the moment. 

00:50:42 Sultan Ghaznawi 

As you heard, automation is perfect for offloading repetitive and mundane tasks from our human workforce to computer processors while freeing up our people to do more exciting things. 

00:50:53 Sultan Ghaznawi 

You should ask yourself why should your project manager spend his or her entire day copy pasting when you could do that with an automation solution. 

00:51:00 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Your project manager instead could be spending time talking to your client providing the human touch and making them feel good about doing business with your organization. 

00:51:09 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Automation does not necessarily mean loss of jobs. 

00:51:12 Sultan Ghaznawi 

It simply means. 

00:51:13 Sultan Ghaznawi 

The balancing of work. 

00:51:14 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I think the reason why computers are good with automation is because they lack creativity, which is something neither for more exciting and important things. 

00:51:23 Sultan Ghaznawi 

And you people will enjoy working with people performing more challenging and unique tasks. 

00:51:34 Sultan Ghaznawi 

This brings us to the end of this episode of the podcast. 

00:51:37 Sultan Ghaznawi 

I had a lot of fun talking to material and learning from these experiences. 

00:51:41 Speaker 1 

I hope you. 

00:51:42 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Also had a few action items that you could take and apply to your processes in your organization. 

00:51:47 Sultan Ghaznawi 

If you found this conversation helpful, then you don’t want to miss our future episodes. 

00:51:51 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Don’t forget to subscribe to the translation Company Talk podcast on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify or your platform of choice. 

00:52:00 Sultan Ghaznawi 

Give us a thumbs up or five star rating wherever you’re listening to this podcast until next time. 

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00:52:13 Announcer 

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