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S03E03: Global-First-Ready Enterprise Strategy

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Translation Company Talk - Global Ready First Strategy with Talia Baruch

S03E03: Global-First-Ready Enterprise Strategy

In this episode of the Translation Company Talk, we hear from Talia Baruch about Global-Ready-First Product Strategy. Talia shares her global-ready and geo-fit frameworks for maximizing adoption in new markets at scale. She talks about Localization as a strategic, cross-functional horizontal effort that requires close alignment on MVP priority initiatives across the org. We cover topics such as HQ centralized vs in-country de-centralized teams, building an org structure that enables international horizontal efforts with all key stakeholder leads in all core functions. We discussed how Localization is often misperceived only as a language support production tail-end effort, instead of an upfront influencer for developing and designing the relevant features and value prop positioning for worldwide customers, and much more.
As the enterprise localization department reaches maturity and organizational recognition, localization managers have to make decisions in line with leadership defined KPIs.
Talia is a seasoned localization leader with experience in optimizing product performance and experience to win adoption in new markets. She Headed International Product & Growth at LinkedIn and SurveyMonkey, formerly at Google. Talia Founded GlobalSaké in 2017, as a collective global community of tech executives driving international growth. She’s an independent consultant, helping companies with international expansion and product geo-fit.
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To maximize that new market penetration, you really need to do a lot of you know, recreation sometimes readjusting the value added proposition. Understanding what problem is solving for, who is it solving it for in the new market? How do you define and measure success?

Talia Baruch

Topics Covered

Enterprise localization perception

Fundamental aspects of enterprise localization

Localization program structure

Product localization

Executive sponsorship

Global-Ready-First Enterprise Strategy - Transcript

Intro

Hello and welcome to the Translation Company Talk, a weekly podcast show focusing on translation services on the language industry. The Translation Company Talk covers topics of interest for professionals engaged in the business of translation, localization, transcription interpreting and language technologies. The Translation Company Talk is sponsored by Hybrid Lynx. Your host is Sultan Ghaznawi with today’s episode.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Hello and welcome to Translation Company Talk, your weekly podcast show. Today I’m going to be speaking with Talia Baruch from GlobalSaké about perception of localization. Talia is a global growth executive working cross functionally to make products make sense in the multicultural marketplace. She has 20 plus years of experience leading international expansion and product and growth marketing at Google, LinkedIn and SurveyMonkey, and is a localization and internationalization expert.

 

Talia is now an independent consultant at yewser helping companies accelerate global growth ground up, integrating regional and cultural factors and holistic product strategy and experience performance to win adoption in local markets on a global scale.

 

Talia is also a professor of global branding, international digital marketing strategy and international at CDM or CDM Design School in Mexico, which is an executive MBA program at Hult International Business School, which is also an executive MBA program and at San Francisco State University College of Business. She mentors Google portfolio startups and applied machine learning technologies in emerging markets. Talia is a co-founder of GlobalSaké creating a collective global community of cross functional leads driving new market expansion and launching the monthly ParlamINT corporate education events.

 

Welcome to the Translation Company Talk, Talia!

Talia Baruch

Hi Sultan, thank you for having me.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Thank you, tell us about yourself and what you have been up to lately.

 

Talia Baruch

Wow, so big question. I mean the world is changing on us rapidly so we keep needing to wake up in the morning into a new reality and act quickly. I’ve been really busy on GlobalSaké. We’re just now launching the 2022 program so that has been really, you know, after a blast this program, this is sort of a natural continuation. A lot of… kind of deep focus on an in-person, more intimate and focused… so a lot of a lot of that. Those experiences are gonna, well, be able to see them this year

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Yeah, GlobalSaké events last year were great and I even presented in one of them. I think it’s a very good forum to speak with both sides of the fence. The buyer side and the supplier side and it’s just a treasure trove of information for people who want to learn something about localization, right?

 

Talia Baruch

Yes, and most importantly, cross functional alignment on international efforts. So taking localization to a higher strategic and cross functional level and to discuss more about go-to-market strategy and product good-fit, and there is research for international segments and many other aspects of the business.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So Talia, I always start a conversation by asking about the story. So tell me about your story with regards to localization. How did you start and was it an accident?

 

Talia Baruch

I was born into a multicultural family, very much where east meets west. My father is from Uzbekistan, Bukhara, my mother is from England, her… you know, those two worlds are… couldn’t be more different like, you know my mom, atheist family, single child… my dad, you know, being a big family, very different culture and then in my grandparents’ home in the village in England they were actually from Czechoslovakia, at the time in Vienna, in Austria. We fled, you know… second World War, and hmm, actually created sort of a Noah’s arc, it was actually called the arc. A wooden… an amazing home where refugees from people who were displaced after second World War came and stayed with them. And it was a place a safe haven for multilingual… you know, as a kid I would sit there and hear people talking different accents and different languages, and you know, kind of the salons of the bohemians of the 30s, you know with their like philosopher Karl Popper, philosophers and musicians and poets and so it was a… it was fascinating for me to be exposed to this multiculturalism and I think from a young age I was very much drawn and acted to understanding people throughout their, you know geo locations and and cultural expectations.

 

So so we have, from very beginning basically, that’s what I studied. I studied applied linguistics and literature, French and English, and then took it to localization management, worked on the vendor side for 10 years, and then on the client side I did trans-adaptation for literary content. So trans-adapted of Broadway shows and poetry and such. And then took into a creative copy with marketing material, but then you know the latter 10 years pivoted to product and growth and headed international production growth at the LinkedIn and then at SurveyMonkey. So from content adaptation to international segments adapting the product experience and performance to be adapted for for international segment. And that’s that’s kind of been the natural journey.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Well, that that’s a very interesting story and thanks for sharing the background. Let’s dive into our core topic of conversation today. Talia, we will be covering the perception of localization by inside and outside stakeholders. And you’ve been through many enterprises, you’ve seen how localization is performed. Give me a brief overview of how is localization perceived today.

 

Talia Baruch

Yeah, I think we’ve we’ve gone the certain way from localization, but you know, I joined L10N kind of pretty much when it was at the beginning of its inception, I think you know around 25 years ago, 23 years ago and it’s still the same in the sense that we still many companies, mostly US based companies, still see localization as a as a as a language support production effort. It’s reflected in how’s position within the org structure in companies and also kind of you know they they impacted the business, right? So the perceived impact to the business bottom line, the shift that you know that I’m trying to evangelize for, and we’ve seen some steps forward in that direction is is really around understanding that localization… yes, language support is critical, obviously, but it’s not enough for for continuous in-country adoption, right? So once you’ve… you know it’s enough to kind of land in a new country in a new market with the making it discoverable and accessible with the native language but not to adopt the native the new market right?

 

So for adoption to maximize that new market penetration, you really need to do a lot of you know, recreation sometimes readjusting the value added proposition. Understanding what problem is solving for, who is it solving it for in the new market? How do you define and measure success?

 

All these factors are different in some markets, integrating the regional and the cultural factors, entry or product strategy into how your product is discovered, how it’s unbordered, how it’s engaged, no conversion to to pain, and then retention rates. So all this unique user journey or some core files does need to be rethought to be ready to resonate and to be relevant for your specific addressable segments in each priority market.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

That is actually a very nice segue to my next question. What are the fundamental principles of developing a localization program inside an enterprise? Like we see, you know, some of the Silicon Valley giants are forming very structured departments. What are the basics?

 

Talia Baruch

Yeah, I mean the way I see localization is… let me change the mindset from for example, you know, source English into target, non English and kind of seeing it as a as a linear process which by default results in in international product launches coming much later, after the English product launches, right? And so by the time you know, usually we see like, uh, you know two or three versions behind for the international product experiences and in addition to kind of having, you know, having some gaps in the fundamental back end and meteor infrastructure architecture.

 

So while the UI, let’s say it could be translated, the marketing material can be translated, but maybe search doesn’t work or, you know, site speed instantly slows… instant page loads, latency in the in the new markets, right? You know, maybe the relevancy algorithm doesn’t work, or any of the other fields might… don’t work in the in the native language, right? So all kinds of other inhabitants to the performance quite, quite frankly, and so changing the mindset from kind of localization or, you know, if it seemed wise in a in a narrower spectrum of language support and as a tail end production effort, changing that mindset to including kind of circular cycles versus linear source English into non-English targets, right? So in a circular localization process we would have English is just one of the languages we support, right? In some cases we might want, let’s say if Japan is an early market, we might want to source in Japanese that is created specifically for Japan local content creation and then maybe we want to trans-adapt that to France, right? So you’ll have Japanese into French.

 

So kind of seeing having a much more holistic strategy around the content, around the process, around the launch cycles of the product updates that is not based on source English into target non English or you know domestic US into international non U.S. markets but rather as a… but rather looking at it from a very different angle, right? From an angle that that says OK we are a company that provides this solution to this problem, right? So the markets that we most care about because that’s where we can have most impact, that’s where we have traction. So, and kind of adapting the entire product marketing business strategy to holistically run with that in circular mode, right? And that’s a very, very different mindset of how their good organization operates. And how… and especially on how to align cross functionally all the international efforts. So can you see it now, it is not US versus international, but rather as global, right? But really a global strategy.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So, given the fact that it’s mostly American organizations, that’s propelling this effort, although they’re trying to get into a non English market, is localization really a US driven effort?

 

Talia Baruch

No, I would say absolutely not, I mean it’s yes you have… I mean, it depends on the vertical I guess. But there are a lot of amazing examples, you know, Spotify and many other companies that originate outside of the US. Actually, it’s interesting that oftentimes times you know companies originating from Australia and then in their international expansion story, they don’t even attempt, oftentimes, they don’t even attempt to enter US because that’s too much of a competition, so they actually go forward to prioritize new markets that U.S. companies struggle to adopt, like there, you know, emerging markets or a lot of Asia and Southeast Asia markets, that U.S. companies are, you know, more global standard versus global ready oriented and therefore are not more rigid in their back end infrastructure, so they’re not enabled to instantly deploy the relevant geo-fit user experience, right? Because they they are global standard or not global-ready adaptive and so sometimes… often not sometimes I would say almost all the time, smaller local market competitors actually win those new markets with more efficient way than US corporate, you know multinational corporates, simply because they are set up in a more global-ready versus global standard back-end and they are more agile, they are more adaptive and they you know they take the effort and the investment to actually understand, do the user research in the market research and understand the remaining opportunity in the new market, the addressable segment, what do their end customers most care about? Right? Understand all those factors and most importantly quickly adapt to meet those needs, right? Whereas oftentimes the multinational corporates based from the you know from the US and going outbound and not as agile in orders adaptive in their structure to respond fast enough. Right?

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Talia, let let’s go back to the core of localization in an enterprise. How does the localization unit justifies its existence and its work to other teams? From my experience, most people know about localization and then they run into an issue that requires translation or interacting with a foreign audience.

 

Talia Baruch

Like it really depends on… what I’ve seen in well, most companies, especially US based companies, they have a localization team, sometimes it’s oftentimes it’s internal and they sit somewhere either in engineering or in product org, they’re not necessarily on the… in the table discussing strategic global growth uh, you know initiatives or in those meetings, right? So their visibility to the corporate core objective on the top level, right? And that is limited and at the same time you know they’re not necessarily set up in a way that that invites them, or that makes them, uhm you know, effective influencers across the organization in terms of aligning OKRs. So, for example, when I lead international product at SurveyMonkey I had to align all of my international OKRs that the core, my core objectives accordingly, with each of the stakeholders in each across in each functional team across the company because you know, I could not execute on all of you know, my priority basically has initiatives that relate to any for all other teams. Right? To legal, the biz dev for strategic partnerships in the new markets to marketing, to a SEO and every every possible team I needed to have, I had an international OKR for them right and they needed to execute on it because it was their resources.

 

So even just that piece like enabling an influential, no influence to actually align OKRs across the org, that is something that the company needs to think about right, and and will make available. Oftentimes it’s a big issue…

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So so do you see that in industry there is an effort to create uniformity around that that type of a process for localization or is this something that every organization comes up and and does it their own way?

 

Talia Baruch

I think the standard has been I think now companies are starting to understand and adapt, but the standard up to now has been to see localization as a tail end production team embedded, someone somewhere right in within a team within another within the specific org, but again with with very limited visibility for effective influence. I’m hoping I am seeing some examples of improvement in that area. My… what I’m working on right now, I am an independent consultant as well as running the GlobalSaké and in both cases, you know I’ve worked very closely with clients from startups to scale up to multinational corporations to help them be more efficient with their new markets growth and adoption. Right?

 

And a lot of that work happens on the org structure it happens, of course on the on the product you know, again back-end, meteor and front-end build-ups in strategy, strategic mindset and and so I’m seeing some I’m definitely seeing good progress in that area, but again, this education needs to kind of drill down to more more companies and there is a lot of you know US based companies do struggle too adopt the… they’re able to enter many different international markets, but they do struggle to adopt specific markets where you do need to have that additional layer of effort, like Japan and Germany and Mexico where you know markets that require some regional cultural factors to be weaved into the strategy and quite frankly to actually optimize those core funnels even just a funnel like you know where you have involuntary churn in checkout through to completed orders, right?

 

So you you know, companies invest a lot of money in, you know marketing efforts and boots on ground and strategic partners in in a new market let’s say like Germany, but they have, uh, I often see, roughly, you know, a 30% churn, and this is an involuntary churn of their of people in so their customers, their users in Germany looking at pricing page from there moving out to check on phase one is step 1, Step 2 and so on. About 30% gap in people dropping off in their checkout flow in Germany within from starting check out until completed orders you see about a 30% drop between their Germany performance and their US performance, right? And that is very typical, actually, we see that often with Germany and this is because in Germany customers, you know, the expected behavior is quite different in checkout and companies US based companies you know, they simply translate the interface, but they don’t really change you know too much step checkout and to you know explicit user data consent, checkboxes. It’s better now, GDPR. I run a lot of AB tests like 2 years before GDPR which showed quite drastically like how you know German users they just want to know what you’re going to, how you’re going to collect, use and share their data.

 

As far as they know, they feel more relaxed to sign up and to engage with their product and buy, but it’s you know now it’s better with the GDPR, but still there are a lot of you know the truste seal is not there or you know the the invoice receipt you know all those multi steps are not quite there, so even you know this is just one example from one specific funnel flow and how just by optimizing that for the priority market, like Germany, you can you know you can win you know you, companies leaving a lot of money on the table that otherwise would would have been part of their bottom line.

 

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Sultan Ghaznawi

Talia, that’s an interesting point actually, that you just made so localization has been primarily associated with translation, rightfully or then maybe it’s not the case, but now we see that localization is a lot about a lot more than that. You just mentioned digital product localization, such as it’s you know, the checkout process is different or the people respond to it differently. But then there’s also physical products. For example the steering wheel of cars in the UK versus in the in the US which is on a different side, do you think that the localization team has a role in product localization to meet regulations of those type of things?

Talia Baruch

Yes, absolutely. I always believe that the localization team should be part of the product org and not part of QA for example, because QA again is a tail-end. You know, Albert Einstein always said you know the best way to solve the problem is to avoid it in the first place, right? And oftentimes what we see in linear localization workflows is that you know, not the right… the right steps were not integrated for example, in the content creation and the in the global content management strategy and in in the product development stages right from prototyping to launch and so international the international considerations should have been always part of the conversation at the at the front-end, right? In the product dev design prototyping, in the in the initial user research to understand again what problem we want to solve for in this feature, and so then in the content development, right? Up-front, so when when you see international intervene in the early stages, then by the time QA happens, you know obviously that dramatically reduces the QA effort, and in regression testing right and therefore reduces the time to market, reduces cost associated and so on. But oftentimes we see the opposite, Right? I mean in localization, localization QA, LQA is introduced at the tail end and at that point people, you know linguists say, oh, wait, I didn’t know this was a button and I thought it was any part of the you know embed text, for a button we need a much shorter string to avoid truncation in the field or we need a whole other different word term that suits in this use case, right?

 

All of that stuff can be obviously taken care of you know, avoided if we had different flow, but yes, it’s not just about language support, it’s very much about the value proposition and oftentimes we need to reposition, massage and massage the value prop for a specific market. We had, you know, we encountered that in LinkedIn in many different products, but you know when we reached markets like Japan the whole concept of LinkedIn is you know, the concept of establishing your professional identity with your individual professional identity here in the US, right? And that whole, you know, and that feeds really the behavior of the proof of the product, right? When I create a profile, it’s all about the individual and your individual accomplishments and you put in your skills and your badges and your, right? All that it’s kind of self promotion, right?

 

But in a market, like Japan, this kind of product experience is not a great feat, you know and people feel awkward inviting to connect maybe you know and their boss or a higher level manager or boasting you know, it’s perceived as boasting if they put in a lot of skills and accomplishments on their profile, right However, if it’s… if the value prop is positioned around, you know you know your professional identity is your contribution to your company, right? And the success of your company reflects on your success that’s a repositioning the value prop, and that would influence how the product behaves right and the messaging around the product to help the user is actually take the action designed for each page. So these kind of you know, and that’s what we call like product geo-fit and really that’s really what I call you know, the the product geo-fit in adoption in new markets where it is really to understand the expected behavior of your priority customers in that market.

 

What do they care about what is valuable for them and how can you position the messaging to resonate with them. Right? So that they can engage in a more meaningful way.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Talia, our mutual friend Anna Schlegel, argues in her book, Truly Global – The Theory and Practice of Bringing Your Company to International Markets, that’s the title of her book. She argues that localization is not just about putting some complex processes to work to deliver a piece of content versus what’s viewed by others, but it’s it’s about ensuring to meet client demand in a different culture, do you think enterprises see the value of localization before a funny foreign language mistake is found and their content or someone has launched a lawsuit against them for something offensive? Is the leadership in today’s enterprise aware that localization delivers a lot more than just language?

 

Talia Baruch

It’s it, you know, it depends depend on the company. I found that companies that have founded or the C-levels they themselves come from a different culture, different comp… different countries speak another language lived abroad for a while I feel like they they get it. Right? They understand they have their embedded international orientation. They understand that it’s not just about rendering a different language so that the end user will will understand you but it’s really more about understanding the mindset and the perspective of your end user in the international market and how can you… the product, right? Adapt to that, yes? How can you understand what they want, what they need, right? So it really depends on the company.

 

Definitely I would have seen a lot and this is very common US based companies. They’re very successful in US, Maybe in some other core English markets as well. Australia is is a fairly easy market to adopt because you know they’re out there and they’re small market and there you know it’s a, it’s a historically… It’s very, it’s quite easy to adopt Australia without too many adjustments, besides, of course, legal regulatory compliance adjustments. In other markets like Japan, Germany, in some cases Brazil and Mexico, Saudi, which in UAE which are priority markets for MENA now these are markets that… and certainly in southeast, southeast, Southeast Asia, the value prop is different. You know, and  C levels and founders who get it, and they focus more on what problem we’re trying to solve for, and who are we optimizing it for, and how do we define and measure success? When we focus on those three core questions and build their entire business and org and product strategy around that and then understand OK, well, what does that look like in a different market, right? They are able to be to iterate fast enough, they are able to be adaptive with you know, fast enough to respond to new markets needs and they are therefore able to sustain and grow faster in a much more meaningful way. You do see a lot of you know big companies that are successful in the US very much struggle in specific local markets that are quite different from the US ecosystem.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

At GlobalSaké, you’re doing a fantastic job and bringing people from inside and outside the industry to talk about localization tell me how is that helping with the knowledge gap today. Do you see things moving in the right direction?

 

Talia Baruch

Yeah, yeah, so uhm 2017, you know I noticed that I left SurveyMonkey at that time and I noticed that no one actually teaches… I have not seen a higher ed program that teaches international product, you know me… obviously I teach localization and others teach international relations. But product management per se and then how do we think about the international orientation and the global-ready, and the geo-fit orientation of product strategy.

 

And so I developed a curriculum program to change that and I started and I have been teaching that in different universities it’s part of the Executive MBA program in… CEDEM, CEDEM International Business School. CEDEM in Mexico City is their design school and at Hult International Business School, and then Global Sake 2021 year, you know last year program I sort of took that curriculum that I had developed and basically sliced it into 12, you know monthly modules each of them representing a function, a different function in the org. User research, UI UX design, payments and so on and how it for each of them you know what we tackled where the rounded perspective views of the international elements of each of those functions, right? And so the way we have designed GlobalSaké in terms of the content and in terms of its mission, is to invite, not to preach to the choir. Yes, we localization folks they get it, they understand, it’s really to bring into the conversation the VP of product and the director of marketing and the head of sales, you know different different scale companies all of them are responsible for driving global growth for the company. But they don’t necessarily come from localization or from an international orientation background, so it’s the program is really designed for them. It is designed for coming together, all of us, the L10N folks and the non-L10N folks, right, to align more effectively on international efforts.

 

So that has been really successful in last year, 2021 was a huge pivot year where I can really say because the whole program was online, we grew exponentially and we had many more cohorts coming from Africa and from, you know, from MENA, from, you know, strengthening our European cohorts, from Asia, from Latin Americas and many and many of them are not from localization, and so I’m really happy because that’s exactly what is exactly the goal is to bring those folks into the conversation.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Well, last year I attended the GlobalSaké events, I think I started towards the second half of the year and honestly I was very impressed with the content, and with the environment that you’ve set up. So yeah, you know for people who are not familiar with GlobalSaké, I highly recommend it. I think you should go and check out the website and you’ll find that there’s tons of useful information. Tell me what’s new at GlobalSaké? I hear you have an interesting event coming up. Please share some information with us.

 

Talia Baruch

So last year was focused on, you know, we met every month, it was very hard to organize that, but the goal was on the cross functional enablements for international efforts. This year the focus is on deepening the relationships between client side and LSP side and and so we have 4 quarterly events. Each of them is on a different theme, so the first one coming up in March on March 3rd is the is the… the focus is on people, so it’s the human factor. Then Q2 in June we have process focus, again the cycle… the circular localization focus cycles. Q3 is our technology, AI enablements and Q4 is on geo-fit and we already started onboarding and curating the speakers and we have some yeah, we still folks wanna wanna pitch their paper suggestions, proposals, we still welcome some some new speakers, but we are starting to to build that quickly.

 

And then, in addition to those four quarterly virtual events, we’re going to have a lot of in person local experiences. So more focus on experiences and relationship building, so I’ve introduced like… I call it Loc-Walks, so and the first one I am leading is on February 11 here in San Francisco, and we’ll have more throughout the year in different geo-locations. It’s going to be, this is gonna be on Fridays. It’s a lunchtime thing. It’s the two to two and half hours where we meet in person.

 

In February I’m taking a group to Fort Funston, it’s a nature beach walk, it’s amazing, will pick me, can bring a Mediterranean spread. My husband makes the most amazing hummus, that will be part of the experience with wine and everything, and it’s really just, you know, breaking bread together, coming together in in a world where you know most people work remotely and isolated in front of the screen all day and everyone wants to go outside great fresh air, meet like minded industry people, just this meet and then get to know any of new people and have interesting, fascinating conversations and and and share an experience together. So we will start rolling that out to other locations with you know different like urban walks and you know… and fire, like real fireside you know, not experience, overnight and other.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

What has the response been to your initiative? Is it making a dent today to educate the the executives who haven’t even heard of localization? What has been their feedback?

 

Talia Baruch

Yeah, uhm, we’ve received some amazing feedback and really, it’s it’s a lot of it is the type of audiences that are part of… we call it the ParlamINT members basically, the ParlamINT members are the folks who subscribe to the annual program. Then we also have some people who just their sign up to specific events. The type of people attending, you know most, the vast majority of them are with a C level or higher management, so people would influence, people are eager to know and to create ties for collaborations and and they are, you know, they are the buyers. They are the influencers, right? They are the thought leaders within the company who will make the decisions and so hearing from them you know that they’ve had a good time, which is really number one priority. We just want people… Life is hard, we just want people to come together and have a good time.

 

We learn from each other because everyone you know, it’s a very savvy audience, everyone knows something right and together we have complementing skillsets, and the goal is really to learn from each other. And you know, also within the sessions we bring speakers who come from different functional positions, right? So representing the different functional orientation around that topic and also representing different size of companies, startups, scaleups, multinationals and representing different geo locations right? So so that’s almost a very interesting perspective for rounded views. Yeah, the the feedback has been amazing. Really, that we’ve been able to, you know, I think people have you know Zoom fatigue, but we’ve been able to, even though these are Zoom events, they’re not established as a passive, you know, webinar content, content consumption. It’s rather a live zoom meeting.

 

Most of the people have their cameras open and it’s you know we see each other. We… there’s a lot of interaction activities throughout the event. There’s live concerts, you know we had musicians coming from Rio and doing live concert and others with Masha and the December event do like content. So a lot of experiences, even though it’s virtual, right? So they have been very engaging and interactive. So yeah so yeah, so a lot of the feedback was around that around learning from each other, building meaningful relationships that helped them, then offline with their efforts, but really mainly just having a good time.

Sultan Ghaznawi

As we reach the end of this conversation, Talia can you share your contact details for people interested in GlobalSaké or to connect with you in general.

 

Talia Baruch

Yes so, so I I wanted, you know, myself and John, John Hayato, who’s my partner, and maybe I will just send you if you go to globalsakegrowth.com, I will send you the link and you know, and then you can maybe share that in the podcast because there’s the 2022 program link within that. And then there’s another link to the Loc-Walks if people want to just sign up to a Loc-Walk in their geo-location.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Absolutely! Well, we will put the link and the information in the description of this podcast and and I’m sure people would love to learn more about GlobalSaké and and and to network, I must say I really enjoyed speaking with you Talia and it was a fun conversation. I’m glad you share your thoughts and experiences with the listeners of this podcast. I do hope that people on both sides of the localization fence, buyer side and supplier side, which is something that GlobalSaké is catering too, I hope they found at least one thing that they could improve in their practice, and if that happened we have hit our goal. With that I want to thank you and look forward to having you on the Translation Company Talk podcast again.

 

Talia Baruch

Thank you so much, so I’m honored to be a guest and and also for the audience, anyone who wants to follow up with any questions or just reach out for proposal papers or anything you can reach me on LinkedIn and I’ll share that with you.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Absolutely! thank you.

 

Talia Baruch

Thank you so much!

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

As you heard from Talia, localization is slowly moving from that obscure part of our business into spotlight. Many organizations recognize the need for localization on its own, but we still are seen as a support function, facilitating communication to foreign markets. I think we will continue to be seen like that, and just like people don’t think about the designer of product until it does not work, end users of localization won’t think much about it until there is a problem. As a service provider, our localization teams deliver tremendous value to organizations making global trade, international business operations and much more possible through language and cultural expertise. Localization will continue to play an important role in global economy, and this function will become more important with proliferation of global trade.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

That was our show for today. It was an interesting conversation and I’m sure we will cover this topic in great detail in future episodes. If there is a specific topic or subject you need to cover in this podcast, please reach out and every effort will be made to find the right expert.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the translation Company Talk podcast on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify or your platform of choice and give this episode a thumbs up or five star to boost its rating.

 

Until next time.

 

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Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast episode are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Hybrid Lynx.

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