Call Now! 1-888-427-5999

S04E09: Agile Localization Framework for the Modern Enterprise

Hybrid Lynx > Podcast  > S04E09: Agile Localization Framework for the Modern Enterprise
Adelina Cristovao from Wolt speaks with The Translation Company Talk podcast about Agile Localization Framework for the Modern Enterprise

S04E09: Agile Localization Framework for the Modern Enterprise

Translation Company Talk podcast brings you another exciting interview with Adelina Cristovao. We hear from her about agile localization practices for the modern enterprise. Online platforms that offer services such as food delivery, ride-sharing, and other task-based services constantly have to keep content fresh and up to date in order to keep their users informed, and educated, and make them feel safe.
Adelina talks about how agility is architected for localization at enterprise level, how content for a service-based organization is different from a product-based platform, how to ensure consistency and harmony in language, what steps to take to make it easy for localization in terms of content engineering, the expectations from stakeholders to manage agile content flow to make sure everyone is on board and to ensure an uninterrupted flow for all, and much more.

So, if the development team is very agile and then localization is not, then localization becomes a blocker. So, I think that we all, people in the localization industry, just have a lot of knowledge about everything. So, we are people that know a little about a lot of things. Generalists, if you want, in that sense, which is great because we keep learning, and we understand that there is a gap, and we go and learn everything about it and then try to use it in the best possible way for our orgs. So, localization managers are the best.

Adelina Cristovao

Topics Covered

Agility in localization

Localization for service based enterprises

End-user focused outcomes

Process agility

Upstream and downstream activity impact

Accounting framework for agile framework

Agile Localization Framework for the Modern Enterprise

Intro

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

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Welcome to this episode of the Translation Company Talk podcast. Today we will cover agile localization practices for service-based organizations. Online platforms that offer services such as food delivery, ride-sharing, and other task-based services constantly have to keep content fresh and up to date in order to keep their users informed, and educated, and make them feel safe.

 

To speak to me about agile localization practices in this space, I have invited once again Adelina Cristovao from WOLT. Adelina Cristovao is the product localization lead at WOLT and has been in this role since September of 2022, where she manages localization across a variety of markets. Prior to that, she worked at Trivago and served as head of localization program complemented by such roles as agile facilitator and mentor after having started as localization project- and team manager and team leader. And before that, she worked in a variety of localization management positions at Intercontact. She is a seasoned localization professional with a very deep understanding of the localization market. She is based in Düsseldorf, Germany.

 

Adelina, let me welcome you to the Translation Company Talk again. How are you?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Hello. Doing well, thank you. How are you doing?

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I’m glad to hear that. Very well, thank you. Adelina, it’s so good to have you back on this podcast after a smashing interview a couple of months ago and you talked about the German market. People loved it. And for people listening to you for the first time, can you please introduce yourself and tell us what you do?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Thank you for having me back, Sultan. It was a pleasure for me too. So yes, my name is Adelina. I work as a product localization lead at WOLT. At the moment, I have been doing this role since September and taking a big pleasure out of it to develop the localization process for WOLT at the moment.

 

I have been in a similar role in the past as well, developing localization processes and programs and also focusing on the output of localization processes in the past and basically just been in this industry for over 20 years, having started as a translator, which allows me to have a very nice view of all of the seats in the localization industry and all of the ways of actually impacting localization, but also the globalization effort of companies.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

How has the year been so far for you as an enterprise localization leader?

 

Adelina Cristovao

The year has been quite interesting. And I’m actually starting my year in September, which is when I joined WOLT and it marks a difference between what I was doing before. So since then, I have been actually looking at this company, which is already quite big and coming out of a start-up basically to a much more mature setup and trying to build a localization program for these teams and for all of the product landscape that this company actually has. This has been quite challenging because the localization effort has been ongoing. It didn’t start with me, so there was already a process in place and some solutions in place.

 

When I was invited to manage them, obviously now I have to somehow make sure that things keep working while creating a new structure on the go. And this is quite a challenge, trying to understand needs, but also pinpoints and the expected solutions and making sure that somehow all of this finds a way to work together. So that’s quite interesting.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Well, you’ve come a long way in developing that. And I’m sure as a leader in the localization space, what you do and will be documented and do best practices shared with the rest of the industry today in our interview. So, I’m looking forward to hearing more about that. As a follow up to our last interview, Adelina, how is the German localization market performing this year compared to Q1 of last year?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Well, in comparing to Q1 of last year, I really don’t have data because it’s not that easy to find specific data to see that. But if we look at the indexes of the industry, we can see that there are more German companies in the index of the localization companies growing in revenue. So, I would say that this is a good sign for the development of the German localization market, both in terms of the companies that want to come into Germany, but also the companies in Germany that want to go outside of the market.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Adelina, today we are going to be covering an important yet not much discussed topic. Enterprises have moved away from large, chunky localization orders to agile and always flowing localization frameworks. You are obviously championing this in your organization. I think this is something that you have expertise in as well and practice it on a daily basis. Please describe at a high level, Adelina, how agility is architected for localization at enterprise level.

 

Adelina Cristovao

Yes, agility and localization were a great thing to do. I’ve started looking into this for several years now, before it was a tendency or a trend. But yes, figuring out how localization can serve best, best serve industry and also project management, which is a little bit of a related topic, was an interesting journey.

 

But I could say that in terms of the enterprise, agility comes or is implemented through the process as a lot of things. In this case, it’s something we call, and everybody knows about, which is the continuous localization process. This is one of the ways, which just means that we don’t need to wait for things to be, let’s say, bundled or collected in a pool somehow and that given a specific date, we send it out. And we also don’t need to insist that source content or source copy has the exact and the final and the best possible quality before we start the localization process. This is always ideal that copy is final, but this is not a realistic expectation anymore. Even if copy is final today, tomorrow something may change somewhere outside, and we need to change the copy anyways. These are the two things that we don’t need to insist or wait for anymore as localization managers. A, that copy is completely final before we start and B, that a certain amount of copy or content is created until we can actually kick off the localization process. So, this is one way of creating agility for localization in an enterprise.

 

The second is actually on the output side, making sure, so how can we make sure that the output is meeting requirements or is meeting expectations or is meeting a specific standard that we have defined as quality, which is always the quality is always this movable term. And also, here agility can help us if we don’t consider the output as final as well. So, the final output is only final on that second, but it can change. So either it changes because again, copy needs to change. So, something legal changed or there was an event in the world, and we need to change copy, and this makes the output change again.

 

And also secondly, the standard, this quality measurement also is changing, and it changes very quickly. So, what appeals to a customer on one week may not appeal on the next. And we need to also take this into consideration and expect it and be ready to react in case some of these changes happens. Meaning that direct user feedback is also a friend of the agile localization process.

 

So if we have these two things in place, like the mindset that yes, copy may change and let’s hear what the direct user or customer is saying and be able to implement this quickly in the process of localization, then I think we can talk about having an agile process able to continuously flow and to adjust to any changes that are required by the outside world.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

How is content for a service-based organization different from a product-based platform such as Amazon, which deals with e-commerce solution for tangible goods, for example?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Well, I think it’s similar to what I just said. Service is all about the user experience. We want to provide a service that makes people happy or provides a solution for need or a problem to satisfy something that they need. In this case, we need to actually always be able to change and to shift what we are producing in terms of localization to be able to meet that need or to solve that problem.

 

I think in terms of consumer goods company, like you mentioned Amazon, Amazon might even be a mix of both. They also provide services. But in terms of a consumer company, the goods don’t change that much. So, they have a description, they have a sort of requirements and things that they do. And this is more static, this is less dynamic, it’s more static than working on the service side.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Even that every piece of content going through the enterprise, you know, that creative publishing pipeline that you have, it gets adapted in a specific way, such as marketing texts follow one approach, whereas technical content or HR content go to a different workflow. How do you make sure that the process can be agile and responsive for all of these different business units?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Yeah, there is where technology is our friend. If we are able to identify all of the sources of content, then we are able to create, to use a tool, a translation management software or a CAD tool that serves as an interface and is able to grab different contents from these different sources, ideally in an automatized way. And then driving these contents through the different processes or flows that have been predefined.

 

So that would be in my view, one of the best ways of actually catering to all of these content types. First, understand what they are, where they are and who originates them and then use a tool to actually grab it, send it to the right flow and then send it back after everything is done.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And do they all need to be agile or some of them could be used in a traditional workflow manner?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Well, they can be done manually, but that is definitely not the way to go. I would say, I think they should all be agile, and they can be all agile.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

We talked about the size of localization assignments earlier. Please elaborate on what extra work should be done to ensure consistency and harmony in language.

 

Adelina Cristovao

Yes, a style guide. So, there are global requirements coming from the business strategy that need to be known and communicated to linguists. And then we can create a version of that global strategy or requirements for each language or for each locale via style guides.

 

So, this is something that we need to have in place from the beginning, because this is where the translators or the linguists get their instructions from and where they can make decisions based on. And when we want to make changes to the output, first thing to do is to make a change to the style guide. And then this will allow the linguists to create the change that we want.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Adelina, most service-based organizations, such as WOLT, where you work, they have to address users’ communication needs that are very unique and customer experience is, of course, at the heart of everything and it’s critical in that sense. Things such as screen real estate on desktops, tablets, mobile devices, shelf life of content, such as discount that is valid for a few hours of the day, and other factors play a critical role in how you grab the user’s attention and keep it. Now, when it comes to localization, how does it play a role to ensure maximum impact and success in this sense?

 

Adelina Cristovao

I think it’s the same. I mean, we need to really… It’s not we cannot… In localization, we cannot use one formula and apply it to everything. We just need to be able to understand what needs to be localized, why, what purpose. What is, for example, what is the user journey where this content is going to be used? Or even more, what is the specific user journey stage where this content can be used and apply a different way in the style guide to address this kind of content?

 

So, we need to identify what we are localizing, what does it require in order to be successful, and what do linguists need to do in order to meet that? And ideally, in the end, have a way of actually controlling or monitoring or getting an understanding if the content is actually performing how it should, which again, requires that we know how it should perform, that we have a specific metric that we can observe, and ideally have a way of understanding how the user is reacting to this content, and then again, be able to act or to react very quickly in order to change it. So, it’s like this entire ecosystem that needs to be working in order to make it happen properly.

 

That’s one of the reasons I feel that even knowing what we know now about machine translation and even more about AI, which we cannot ignore, that even if it works very well on this transactional perspective, yes, it translates, yes, it translates accurately, but it also does the other things that I just mentioned.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

When we look at agility, where content is constantly flowing, what does it mean for upstream processing of content? So, before it comes to localization, what type of work gets done? As you mentioned earlier, in terms of the copy editing or creating the copy and adapting, are there things that can be done to make it easy for localization in terms of content engineering?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Definitely. The work upstream, the audio upstream work is extremely important, not disregarding that we expect that things are not perfect or that they change, but the first copy to be sent into translation needs to have an intention. So, it needs to serve a specific purpose and be considered done by the originators.

 

That being said, yes, I mean, writing, the grammar, the correctness, the style, the tone, the voice, knowing what it’s intended for and if it’s a part of a website, making sure that from the technical side, if we are writing a UI for user interface, that we consider all the internationalization good practices, that we know what needs to be considered in that case and that we have the right placeholders in order to make sure that dynamic copy like dates, currencies, time, but even things like links, at least this would be the basic, that this is considered in the way that the copy is written. So, a technical copywriter would know how to do this. A typical UX copywriter, maybe not. So, this is a skill that should be integrated in this process to make sure that we know how to write our placeholders and that we know what is coming out of them and how this impacts copy.

 

Yeah, not to mention one very typical aspect of things, pluralization, that we know how this is, how the behavior is in the languages and that we have a way to actually do this automatically so that pluralization is in place where it should be.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

How about downstream activities in terms of post-processing? How does that change to accommodate agile and continuous content flow in a ubiquitous fashion across all channels?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Yeah, that is a good point. Maybe agility in that aspect, I’ve tried that. It’s a manual effort to have people checking, for example, the end outputs of the languages in the layouts before it gets released. This is quite manual. It could have an impact on release time. It can be done, of course. We could do it in an agile way as well if we have a flow. So, if we have a tool that allows this to flow and if we have a good working relationship with the stakeholders in that part of the process, that is possible. We can replace it with something that is a little bit more risky, which is direct user feedback. So exposing users to what we produce and then expect their feedback to make proper changes so that we don’t over-engineer something or that at least we over-engineer only after knowing if this is really relevant. Because this final part of actually testing the layout, all of the languages, it takes some time and some effort to do. So, it’s a consideration, it’s a decision.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Adelina, I would like us to shift our focus on relationships. Obviously, an enterprise like WOLT will have certain internal capabilities, such as your localization team, but also external capabilities like vendors that process that content. What are the expectations from such stakeholders to manage an agile content flow to make sure everyone is on board and it’s an uninterrupted flow for everybody?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Yes. One of the first expectations or one thing that is really important to have is that the vendors are able to actually support a continuous localization flow, which they aren’t in theory. But then when it comes to very little content or very low volume, this is what I meant. So, when the volume is very low, this can actually block the continuous flow on the vendor side for reasons that have to do with the external translators that work for them as well on their side. So, when we have just two words that need to be translated or localized, this causes a cost, or it takes effort. And then we have the minimum charge that is in place whenever we have a little volume of things to do, this adds costs. So, this is one of the big blockers that I see on the vendor side in order to enable a true continuous workflow, the minimum charge for low volumes up to a certain place, because this forces us to do what I just said before, that is not a friend of an agile flow, which is the bundling. So, then it forces us to bundle and to wait. And that’s not what we are looking for.

 

What we’re looking for is that as soon as something is created, it can go into the flow, it gets translated and gets sent back without worrying about bundling or if small volumes will create higher costs, which obviously in practice doesn’t really make a lot of sense. I understand where this is coming from, but maybe we can rethink this and do it differently.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Absolutely. I get it. In our company, we have the same situation where we also as a supplier, basically, we have to deal with minimum charges, but we have decided that for clients that are continuously working for us, we have removed that minimum charge. So basically, we assume that the amount of content at the end of the month is what we should be billing for, not on a per assignment basis. I think that’s how agility can be supported.

 

Adelina Cristovao

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I fully agree that if you come once short, then it’s fine. If you continuously have a connection and this is being done day in, day out, week in, week out, then yes. Then it should. I mean, I think that’s a good approach and a good perspective on thing, enable the customer to do that.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I would assume that automation in the form of machine translation, neural machine translation, you mentioned to it earlier, robotic process automation and so on can help take some of the load and dynamically route content based on the type and nature, as we talked about earlier, whether it’s marketing, HR or whatever. How do you define these protocols for automation? Do you have a playbook for how deep automation should be integrated into your workflow?

 

Adelina Cristovao

I don’t have a playbook yet. This is something that’s a work in progress. But yes, the usage of automation in the sense of machine translation, having an engine to provide machine translation, it’s a decision. I mean, there are companies already using machine translation for the entire content, even for copy on the UI. That’s an interesting approach.

 

I haven’t studied that a lot yet. But generally speaking, up until now, what companies do is that they decide what is the content A that is suitable from its nature to be run through an engine. And B, then we also decide based on either volume, if it’s a huge volume and it cannot be done in a different way because of cost and also time.

 

But also, if it’s not a matter of cost and money, or at least if it’s not a matter of volume, let’s put it like this. And it’s just a matter of having efficiency or even having a less costly solution for a specific part of the content that is not considered as valuable for the business as maybe other types of content. So, it’s either volume based, or value based, basically.

Sponsor

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

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Back to vendors, I see that there is a significant shift in the type or size of localization orders that they process. What can they do to better perform in terms of localization and handling the smaller chunks of text that may have less repeatability and structure? You mentioned that cost is kind of an obstacle right now, but what else is blocking to develop that agility with smaller chunks of content?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Well, smaller pieces of content obviously pay less to a vendor. It’s not a content. Small pieces are not what the vendor is aiming for. It’s not the ideal order, which doesn’t mean that this is not high value content for the company, so for the customer. Maybe we need to rethink this relationship between value of the content and volume. So, the volume is not like there is not a big chunk of volume every week, but over a year, for example, there is a lot. And if there is a relationship with a vendor, it builds. And when there is new content, it also comes.

 

But when it’s just small volumes at a time, it doesn’t make the content as desirable as if I say I have like 10 million words. It’s not the same as if I have, oh, I have 200 words a week. And then obviously then there is a difference in terms of the desirability of the content.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So, Adelina, in your role as a localization manager or leader, what are your thoughts about the cost? We talked about the cost of localization in the context of agility and how small pieces of content actually adds up. But we are looking at the content in the context of rapid response, content transformation. Do you feel that enterprises have to spend more to ensure just in time content delivery across multiple locales? Can it be made possible? Do you think that vendors have to deal with more complexity, not just cost, but more complexity in order to support agility?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Well, the idea is not to remove the strain of, let’s say, enterprises and put the same and put this strain on the vendors. The weight needs to be carried equally somehow. Otherwise, at some point, the relationship will not be meaningful for both. It needs to remain valuable for both sides. When this situation comes or when something like this comes, I think the best is to start negotiating and really understand what is important for one side, what is important for the other, and how can we actually reach a point where this is a satisfying relationship for both sides?

 

I wouldn’t bluntly say that, yes, in order to support orgs, vendors need to do whatever it takes because that generally doesn’t bring success and joy and happiness. So, I would find a way of making sure that, yes, we get it quickly and continuously, even our small content or copy is done quickly and continuously. What does the vendor need in order to make this happen in a way that is also meeting their own needs and interests? So that’s what I would suggest.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Adelina, let me ask you about the value of localization in terms of agility. Is there a unit of measure to determine the value of a piece of content in terms of dollars or any other commodity? For example, let’s say what is the content cost for one paragraph for an enterprise? And to build on that, what is the ROI for that one paragraph? How much that ROI would rise if that one paragraph of text is localized into X number of locales or languages?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if there is a unit of measurement, but what you suggest is already the basic of the reasoning, right? So, if we have a paragraph only in English, maybe it doesn’t cost a lot, but also the ROI is not very big because only English-speaking users can actually use it and access it. That we need to also spend a little bit more money or invest, right? Because this is not a cost, it’s an investment that we invest in making this paragraph accessible to users, not only in other countries, but also speaking other languages. And then the value of the user is a part of the ROI of the translation or the localization of that paragraph.

 

So how much is a new user worth for the company? And that would be the question. And is it worth investing a bit of the available resources to actually get the paragraph translated? And the opposite question, what’s the cost of opportunity of not doing that?

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

In the past, content had an intrinsic reuse value. Today, it does in the form of translation memory in the context of localization. But given the disparate nature of agile content, has the reusability index and the value dropped?

 

Adelina Cristovao

I would say yes. Not, I would say yes, because of the reusage potential is still there. So, using the same words in the same languages, yes. But it is very possible that the context changes and that we can reuse the English copy, for example. But we need to readjust the languages because the context just changed. Either because it’s a different channel or a different part of the user journey, or even because the different countries that we are applying it as before, or even the cultural awareness of the countries changed over the years, that people now prefer different things and that we need to change tone or voice.

 

So, it could very well be that we need, we can or should actually reuse the content, but still make adaptations if we notice the context changing. So, it’s not a one-to-one like maybe it was in the past at some point.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Back to vendor communities for them that they have not yet realized in terms of capabilities.

 

Adelina Cristovao

Yes, if orgs evolve, vendors need to evolve as well. And agility actually provides, if we as localizations managers allow more changes to the source copy, this obviously means that there needs to be more changes also to the target copy. And if we are just very, stop being inflexible about, no, we cannot change the English copy, we need to reuse it as it is, but say, yes, change it, please, according to whatever is necessary, and we will retranslate. This is an opportunity. Even if the volumes are little and we just keep retranslating things that have been done in the past, obviously this adds opportunities for the vendors to also retranslate, even if it’s only changed based on the context, which means in terms of translation memory, that it stops being free and it has a cost associated because we take it out of the IEC, for example, and need to put it under 100% or 75 or something.

 

So, the matching changes and this means that suddenly this content has a cost associated and before it didn’t. So yes, I think that agility provides an opportunity for everybody.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I’m sure you talked to other localization managers and the community at large. Is there a common standard or best practice set of guidelines that enterprises must follow for effective agile localization for their content or it’s basically everyone has built their own set of processes that work best for them?

 

Adelina Cristovao

I would keep saying it’s the latter. I don’t think that there is like a playbook for everybody to drink from. There are several ways of getting information and I’m sure that several people use the same sources, but it’s their own choice. It’s like they make this decision that maybe agility was not born in the localization industry, was not even born in the project management industry. It was born in software development, right? But it makes a lot of sense to use it for localization because localization is a part of product development anyway.

 

So, if the development team is very agile and then localization is not, then localization becomes a blocker. So, I think that we all, people in the localization industry, just have a lot of knowledge about everything. So, we are people that know a little about a lot of things. Generalists, if you want, in that sense, which is great because we keep learning, and we understand that there is a gap, and we go and learn everything about it and then try to use it in the best possible way for our orgs. So, localization managers are the best.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Of course, they are, of course. No question about that. Let me hear from you Adelina about the perspective of translators and linguists with regard to agile content. It means handling small amounts of work at a short deadline and the type of translation they’re used to or taught in school where content was always sized in thousands of words or hundreds of pages is not the norm anymore. How have they adapted and what do they think about agile localization?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Yes, that is a good question. I was a translator back in the days, but still when it was like you initially described, so when it was not agile. And at this point, I would say that everybody in the industry understood that we need to adjust quickly. In the case of freelance translators, when we have the minimum charge, which is often also a requirement that freelance translators have to their vendors, to the companies that they work with, and this is a way of protecting themselves. Maybe this is something still from the past that might be rethought. That maybe this shows that there is still a little adaptation that is necessary.

 

Again, like I said before, we don’t want to do this at the cost of vendors, and we also don’t want to do this at the cost of translators and even less on freelance translators. But maybe this is also an invitation to recheck if there is anything more that we could do in order to move towards collaborating more closely for the sake of agile localization, which in the end will bring more work towards people, even if in less volumes at a time.

 

And even if we want to have it quickly, if our turnover time is very short, and which would actually mean like 24 hours, something like this, which is something that I didn’t mention before, but it’s also a blocker. So, there should be an SLA. Nothing below 200 words cannot take three or four days. It’s just not possible.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

As we reach the end of this conversation, Adelina, can you please share a few words of advice for our industry, both on the supply and buyer side to better prepare for this shift and how we process agile localization of content?

 

Adelina Cristovao

Yes, I think we just need to keep talking to each other and really understand what is needed, what we need from both sides. Like I said before, people working in the industry, I mean on the org side, we should not expect that the weight and the effort is carried by our vendors, our suppliers, which are our best friends. Also, not by translators finding ways of making this work for everybody, keeping everybody’s interests at heart so that we can grow and develop all together. I guess that’s what it’s all about.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And with that, we reach the end of this interview. I’m so happy, Adelina, that we got to speak again and cover this important topic. I think you’re a pioneer and a leader in this space and sharing your experience and thoughts and developing an agile, responsive localization framework helps our industry colleagues think in those lines and improve how they implement localization in their organizations. I hope we can talk about this subject in the future. And I want to thank you for your time and for sharing your perspective with the industry today.

 

Adelina Cristovao

Thank you. This is a topic that I’m really passionate about. I really like it. And I want to really thank you for having me over to talk about this. And it was really my pleasure.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

OK, it’s time for my roundup of the interview and my analysis as to what has been discussed.
Localization has evolved from a linear function where long bodies of text were translated over an extended period of time to real-time response and information sharing in the form of small bits of content. We have recently heard from Smith Yewell, CEO of WeLocalize, as well as John Fennelly, CEO of Lionbridge, on how workflows have evolved to respond to this change of trend and localization. Enterprises have learned that real-time and agile localization allows them to serve their customers and users in a much better and timely fashion. There will always be demand for large linear translation and localization deliverables such as books, product manuals, and other large bodies of text. However, it is important to take the bigger picture into account.

 

Translators and LSPs alike must be ready to adapt to a changing nature of localization in which technologies such as neural machine translation and generative AI such as ChatGPT could take off a big chunk of the localization load, allowing human expertise for supervision or processing of intuition-demanding tasks where subjectivity plays a key role in defining context. We must embrace the shift to agile and responsive localization. This is the only way as an industry that we can power global reach for enterprises.

 

There you have it. This episode of the Translation Company Talk Podcast comes to an end. There was a lot of learning for me and I’m sure you also found a few key takeaways that you could apply to your business. As always, thank you for listening and keeping an open mind. Remember, only the agile can leap forward in our next industrial revolution.

 

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Translation Company Talk Podcast on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your platform of choice and promote this episode by sharing it on social media, giving us a like or thumbs up or adding your comments. Until next time.

 

Outro

Thank you for listening. Make sure to subscribe and stay tuned for our next episode.

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.

Hybrid Lynx
No Comments

Post a Comment

Comment
Name
Email
Website