| Jim |
Hi, I’m Jim Compton. I manage the partnerships team at RWS Moravia and have been focused on applying technology to solve globalization challenges for something like 25 years.
Today I’m thrilled to be talking to Andre Hemker who is the founder and CEO of the localization company Wordcraft International, and he’s also the new CEO of translation management platform WordBee.
I met Andre at the globalization and localization event in Munich in 2019 and I thought he had some really interesting and, dare I say disruptive, ideas about how to approach film, video and video game localization and about the application of technology in localization in general. So, I thought it would be great to talk to him here. |
| Andre |
I’m Andre Hemker. I met Jim last year in Munich at GALA. We have the same kind of crazy ideas about the whole localization topic.
I did a bunch of things in my life. I worked as a post-production audio engineer for 10 years. I worked in media production. At the same time, I went to university to study translation. And at some point, I founded my own company together with my now wife where we basically combined our knowledge from media production with translation, localization. And when the podcast is airing, I will be the new CEO of Wordbee. Wordbee is a translation management system that I work with; basically, my weapon of choice for many years. |
| Jim |
When we met, I was like, this is a guy that I think shares a bunch of my maybe out-of-the-box ideas and even criticisms about the localization industry. We actually chilled out in front of our hotel in the evening, maybe having a few beers talking about the industry. |
| Andre |
Yeah. I think the topic was effective use of translation management systems in all your visual localization workflows and actually, you know, show how it is possible to use really amazing stuff that we have in the localization world together with really amazing stuff that they have in the post-production world, and how powerful those tools are combined. Because the one side doesn’t have the other tools and the other side doesn’t have the tools of the other side, and the combination is pretty powerful. |
| Jim |
I totally agree. You essentially took a video—and I’m gonna let you tell the story—but you filmed this basically promotional video in Poland, right? And in terms of localization, you were able to make it look like you actually filmed it in Las Vegas. And I find this idea so intriguing. But could you maybe explain to the folks what the video is showing? |
| Andre |
So basically, we had a multitude of tasks. First of all, you know, we had to make a promotional film for a company that makes GPS software for cars and stuff. So, we had to film a highway and we could have flown over to the US, but blocking off a highway in the US is, you know, it’s not that easy. So, well, you know, we talked to, you know, some of the Polish authorities and they were like, “No problem. Let’s do it.” |
| Jim |
Let’s do it! [Laughs] |
| Andre |
So, we filmed the entire scene on a highway in Poland. We changed the signage, changed the road markings. Basically, let’s apply localization to what we see in the film. And then of course we had text, which was all, you know, After Effects overlays. And, you know, we figured out a way how to get the texts out of After Effects in translation management systems.
Everything had to be quick and they had to sign off the texts. And we basically used cloud-based CAT tools as a tool to have them, you know, review and change things in the animation, in the motion graphics, and basically used a translation management system as a tool. Of course, not for the signage, but, you know, for pretty much everything else, no matter if it was a voiceover or the motion graphics. But basically, you know, [we] created a wild hodgepodge of classic media production and localization. And yes, the client was super happy. The whole thing ran at the CES in Las Vegas and I guess you have to pay attention very closely in order to notice that this is actually not in the US. |
| Jim |
Totally fooled me. You would have assumed that it was a bunch of cars—you know, party cars, caravan—like, making its way to Las Vegas. I was really intrigued by two aspects of the demo. First, when we say, like, localization of video, people are usually thinking, like voiceover and maybe text, right? But you’re actually taking objects, like geographical objects, and treating that as a localizable piece of the video. So, it’s a much, like, broader idea of what… |
| Andre |
Is it really? |
| Jim |
…a localization job is. |
| Andre |
I mean, the thing is, in localization, that’s what I never understood, you know? That everybody is, like, so strict about things. Let’s say we localize a US catalog to a Polish catalog. We basically take that catalog and make the whole thing work in Poland. We don’t translate—I don’t have to repeat this—we all know this. You know how it works. And the same thing goes for everything else. We just took a Polish highway and localized it to become an American one. |
| Jim |
I love this idea. We localized the highway. |
| Andre |
Yes. I mean, that’s exactly what we did! |
| Jim |
I think when I was describing this to other people, I’m saying it’s really deep localization, right? It’s localization of not the surface, but the essence. And when you think of it that way, if you were to be, like, Localization King of Hollywood…I’m just gonna make that up. |
| Andre |
There was a time when I would have loved to do that. But I tried so hard and I failed. I couldn’t get…you have no idea how many papers I wrote, and stuff and oh boy. |
| Jim |
The logical conclusion of your approach, like in Hollywood, what would that look like? |
| Andre |
Well, the interesting thing is that there’s still so much to be done. There’s so much to improve, and they could save a lot of money and make things a lot better if they thought about the whole thing holistically. For instance, give you one example. You know we have dubbing countries; we have subtitling countries. But, you know, dubbing is something that for certain countries, you need; Germany’s one, France is another one, Spain is another one. It’s an expensive process if you want to do it right. I know a lot of people bash dubbing, especially in our industry or, you know, because, well, you have to watch the film in the original language. But, you know, not everybody speaks the original language, so I disagree. And in order to do it right, you have to spend a lot of money and time to basically create a dubbing mix, which has to be done by really good people, really professional people. It’s expensive; good actors. It takes money.
However, in the current way that things are done, you basically have to do the mix and that expensive process for every single language. And I’ve written papers about how to basically get away with a single mix. It’s super easy to understand for localizers. Think about a PowerPoint presentation. And people say to you, “Well, you know, I have to create another PowerPoint for Spanish. And you have to create another PowerPoint for Russian.” And you go, “No, you don’t. You just swap out the text.” And you could do the same thing in dubbing, and that’s not how they do it.
And that’s why they spend a whole lot of money on it. That’s why the quality is really awful when you compare, for instance, German dubbing. You know, I speak a lot about dubbing because I’m a post-production audio engineer. This is really dear to my heart, this topic. You look at a high-budget Hollywood movie, which is mostly really amazingly done, and then you look at the Netflix show and you have to switch it off because it’s so awful. When now, for instance, Amazon and Netflix, they buy shows from other countries and then you have text and picture. I just the other day saw a Russian thing. And it was, like, a Sci-Fi theme and they had, like, a wristband and you could see Russian text on it. You had no idea what it means. Now, I can’t read Cyrillic. I know this was an After Effects layer at some point. So, what’s the problem in getting that After Effects layer out, localize it, push it back into After Effects, press render and get it out there?
It’s a lack of imagination. You have to do things holistically and a lot of people have to work together. But, well, that’s localization. |
| Jim |
I’m glad you bring it up, because it sounds like one of the barriers, I think, is this different technology ecosystem barriers, right? Like, localization has its own tech stack and, like, audio production and video production have their own tech stacks. And the fact that they are these kind of separate ecosystems, I wonder if that is one of the reasons why this Cyrillic message on a watch that could have been localized, wasn’t, was because there’s actually this sort of gap between the systems that do that localization and the systems that do the production of what would be the end result.
And I feel like this is another technology principle, I guess, that I detected in your demo: you’re actually bringing the localization technology into, and I guess integrating it with, the systems that are doing the actual audio/video production. |
| Andre |
They’re just not a lot of people that know both worlds and well enough to actually be capable of combining them. And there’s a lack of understanding that doesn’t only go for the media industry; it goes for, you know, all sorts of industries that we serve. There’s a lack of understanding for our process. And on our side, there’s often a lack of understanding for their process. |
| Jim |
I think what your call to action is for the industry is we need to basically integrate into their process where the actual creativity is happening. And do so by sort of embedding our tools or our process into where the actual original content gets created. And it sounds like one of the reasons why you would want to do this is so that you can actually reduce the time. I guess, maybe have the localization work being done basically at the same time that creative work is still going on. |
| Andre |
But at the same time, give localizers more time, because that’s one of the things that I’ve seen all the time: nobody is aware of what we do. Why would they? They’re concerned with their stuff. Why care about us? So, a lot of time passes before a lot of people [get] to do a lot of things, to agree on a lot of stuff. And then at some point more often as an afterthought, it’s like, “Oh, well, yeah, well, we still need to, you know, create five language versions,” and go like, “Yeah, you have a week.” Even though the entire production process was going on for, like, nine months. It takes longer, but at the same time, we don’t have enough time, and then we have to put people on it overnight, and that costs more money, the quality goes down. What’s good about that process? |
| Jim |
How much content, like, let’s say audio visual content that could be localized, is not, specifically because of this, like, broken process where there is not enough time? |
| Andre |
An incredible amount. For instance, I’ve done some numbers—you know, not for Netflix, for myself—but I use them as a basis. I think they’re live in 198 countries or something crazy. But when you go through their content, then you mostly only find three, four or five dub versions. Because it’s such a specialized process, you need specialized people to do good work, you know?
You can build a workflow where you have one specialized team, maybe in France, in Germany or wherever, create these amazing dub mixes, and the only thing you need in the little country is a talented pool of actors and a good microphone and a guy behind a mixing console that knows how to switch it on. Of course, you don’t have to create, you know, ten PowerPoints; you can just swap out the text, and that’s the point. It’s really complicated to design the beautiful PowerPoint document. But actually, in every country, you find the people that can put in the strings, right? The text. To me, localization needs this holistic view on things.
What does the product come with? What does it entail? What’s in there and how can we all put it in one seamless process? And from the number crunching that I did, you could—as Netflix for instance, or Amazon, doesn’t matter—you could produce 30 language dubs for the price that they’re paying for 4 to 5 now. Easy. |
| Jim |
Wow. |
| Andre |
Easy. Better quality. |
| Jim |
And it’s really all about this modularization model. Like, this way to plan it so that you can localize things that you wouldn’t localize and you can localize it at the same time. |
| Andre |
Here’s the funny part. It’s like, when they produce shows for Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and Disney, the channels are obviously very international. But at the same time, nobody has really thought about incorporating localization into the production process. Even though the channels are by default international. |
| Jim |
I understand that this approach of bringing the localization tooling into the actual system that creates the content, audiovisual applications is an obvious one. But you had mentioned to me that you’re doing the same sort of thing in other creative forums like video game manufacturing. Is that correct? Can you talk about that? |
| Andre |
Yeah, of course. I mean, this is something that we basically just created a proof of concept and something that we want to do in the future because we think it’s really cool and we can’t wait to start. It’s like, think about it, a computer game: what does it consist of? Well, you have text and you have voiceover. And voiceover is just another form of text. And then as we all learned in linguistics, that everything is text. Even the, you know, images and stuff.
So, you know, of course you have images. Might or might not need to be localized. But you have written text and voiceovers, which again is text. So, of course we want to grab that. You create a game in Unity or Unreal and then if you’re clever, then you use an API to export that to Google Sheets or you simply export that to XML or something.
But then you have a file and then people work on it, but they have no context; they just have strings. And you might not notice that because you play everything in English. But if you play some stuff in German, it’s sometimes good, sometimes not, you know? We basically created a dynamic database. It’s just like an empty database that can grow and shrink just like any other database that is connected to a translation management system. We have connected it to Adobe InDesign. We did a proof of concept on Unity and basically use that as a copy of the original and synchronized to rather than going via payload. You know, like a file payload or something. So, depending on how clever the software is that you interface with, you can basically change a string, send it over and see the results straight away in context. We still have to figure out if that’s possible or not. But, ideally, you know, in the future, you could even think of workflows where it’s just possible to click a button and see your translated string in-game. |
| Jim |
Wow. |
| Andre |
Think about it. You could basically incorporate the entire QA in your translation workflow. They have entire QA teams, like, playing the game and dah, dah, dah. Why? Because they, you know, have to reincorporate the strings, then have to compile the game and they play the game. But if you can already do that in context, you could shave so much off the QA process, and therefore the release days and therefore the return of investment and oy oy oy, the sky’s the limit. |
| Jim |
Can we talk a bit about your new gig? You are the new CEO of Wordbee. |
| Andre |
Now that I’m the CEO, I basically have to make sure that the world knows about it. I stumbled over it by accident. They were nice enough to give me a demo, and I just looked at it and went like, “What is…what??” Somebody looked at the entire process from beginning to end and basically has looked at the whole thing holistically from the moment I have to give someone a quote to the moment I have to write the invoices to connections to different APIs and CMS systems. And it was just like this amazing hub, you know, with everything you needed. We run our language school with it. Everything from teacher assignment to invoicing, to every…that’s how flexible it is. I call it, like, a big box of Legos. You can just build things with it, you know? And be crazy and bold with your localization ideas and say, “You know, I want to grab data from here and put it there,” and then somebody does this and then pushes it back over there and this is automatic and dah, dah, dah.
Of course, I seek out the tools that give me the most flexibility. Of course the, you know, flexibility means that you have a lot of opportunity to mess things up. But, somebody comes with a new piece of software and I look at the file format and within a couple of minutes, I’ve built a filter for it. Within half an hour, an hour, I’ve actually built a total automation for it where they only have to dump this new format just in an FTP folder and it’s distributed to 20 different people. And I love doing that, and I guess that’s a solutions architect kind of thing where you go like, “Yeah, I’m gonna build this fire-and-forget weapon that didn’t exist yesterday.”
I’ve got the most amazing CTO that is just as…no, he’s more crazy than I am. He’s so amazing. He comes up with ideas when I thought I go too far and…wow. But the difference between me and him is, like, I would be too stupid to make it become a reality, but he’s not. So, you know, it’s a very valuable combination. [Laughs] And, you know, we have a brand-new technology: an InDesign plugin. That’s the first product that is built on that technology, and what this InDesign plugin can do is basically, it integrates with InDesign; it talks to InDesign. It takes out the text of the documents and is able to rebuild a translated document. And the great thing about that is that you can make any change to the translated documents that you want. And if you change anything in the translation again, then those changes in the target design just stay the way they are. So, you can in an agile workflow start localizing, designing and signing off text and all that kind of stuff. You could do it at the same time rather than having to wait for the different steps.
And that is basically our first product because it was the hardest. We basically had to totally reverse-engineer InDesign to make it work. |
| Jim |
What do you predict that we’re going to see, like, in the next, I don’t know, five years in terms of the localization industry? What are the real trends that you’re expecting? |
| Andre |
Well, you know, I think we’re gonna have two areas. You know, of course, we’re gonna have the people that talk about the machine learning and are really interested in the machine translation and stuff. And of course I’m interested in machine translation and of course I try to keep up with what’s going on and that kind of stuff. But then I think the progress that matters is made elsewhere: where we have deeper integration with the systems that we integrate with, we have deeper integration into our client’s processes.
I think once certain companies see that you can actually give the process more time and make it cheaper and make it better, that, you know, we’re gonna see a lot of development in that area. And I think some people will be surprised because we sometimes think we’ve basically invented everything that we need to work, and we haven’t.
I want to bring technology to the translators and give the translators what they need in order to do their work. Because I worked as a translator for four to five years, I know the struggle. I know what’s really tricky for them.
And even with this InDesign plugin, preview was really built in from the beginning. A very deep integration with terminology management. Not only just words, but also deep integration with additional information, with images, with video, so that you basically get more information when you need it. And thinking, you know, it’s like, this is one of these crazy ideas, you know. Think about a 3D engine. We all know that this kind of game streaming exists nowadays, so why not include that in the localization process and basically stream your localized game and, you know, use that as a preview?
That kind of stuff to just make more things possible, and just take it a notch further, yeah, I think that we’ll see some really, really interesting stuff.
And one thing I’m really interested in, and I know this is close to your heart, is interoperability. I think it is absolutely hideous that our industry is still running so much technology that is not compatible with one another. I think that is something I want to help. I want to find brothers in arms in that respect. Of course, we’re gonna have gaps because different tools have different feature sets, so, you know, I better find a way to be compatible. Then it just makes sense to be technology agnostic and just build whatever fits the needs of your client the most.
In the US, we have a standardized electrical plug. Of course, in Europe, we have another one, but it doesn’t matter, so let’s imagine we had one for the world. Why? Because, you know, we have different electrical appliances that need to be connected to electricity. And that’s why people came up with the idea of a standardized electrical plug. And we all love the idea because it makes total sense. And that design won because it made total sense that you could have a certain set of wall sockets and you bought the electrical appliances that came with that socket. Because if you do some history, if you do some digging, this didn’t use to be like that.
Yeah. So, yeah. I’m just gonna advocate for it and evangelize for it and try to find people in the industry that see it the same way. |
