| Joe |
My name is Joe Holtman and I’m your host today on Globally Speaking. I’m a Business Development Manager here at RWS Moravia and I have five-plus years in the localization industry. In my role, I help match RWS Moravia services to our clients’ business goals in helping them go global.
Today we are joined by Alex who is a product lead for Lokalise, a growing player in the localization technology industry. So, as you would assume, technology is a hot topic among global brands looking to streamline their localization program, and Alex brings us his expertise on this topic today.
He talks to us about how TMS systems work, the importance of design being involved at the beginning of the localization process, the multiple stakeholders involved in buying and using a TMS and he wraps up our chat with machine translation and other trends in the industry. |
| Alex |
Hi Joe, it’s a pleasure to be on this podcast. Yeah, my name is Alex. I’m working as a Product Lead here at Lokalise, and it’s been a pretty interesting journey with Lokalise. I started as their customer success manager but then slowly transitioned closer to the product organization and yeah, currently I’m on the mission to build out the best possible product team. |
| Joe |
That’s awesome. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the differentiation that Lokalise brings to the localization technology industry and why people are being attracted to it. |
| Alex |
One of the reasons why Lokalise also attracts customers and was really built, you know, having that experience of building the products—you need to, you know, localize a mobile app and you need to roll it out efficiently to other markets—and that’s how the whole product got started. Now, one of the kind of things that we’ve been proud of from the day one is that this is the product that was built by developers for developers. So, it was really, you know, taking into account this perspective of the software development process as a whole. It was solving some of the problems that were really close to that specific area, and I would say that there were not many players on the market out there that also solve the problem from the same perspective. And so, that definitely [is] what differentiated Lokalise from the others.
One of the things that we’ve found out recently is that, and that we are advocating for, is to start the localization process at the design stage. So, we have developed some of the functionality, some of the plugins that allowed the modern tech companies to save a lot of money on the costs, because the sooner you start the localization process of your product, you know, the lower the costs and efforts you would have to spend in order to, you know, fix some things and, you know, do some last-minute changes and fix your product when you’ve already rolled it out to the market. |
| Joe |
Yeah. And I think that’s an important concept that we try to talk to a lot of buyers about, is knowing all the different roles that are going to be a part of this decision. A lot of the times we’re talking to a localization manager or a chief marketing officer, but there’s these other roles that are really going to affect your budget in the end and how this process rolls out smoothly.
Why don’t you talk about some other roles that you guys come across that maybe the average buyer wouldn’t be aware that they should be bringing into these discussions? |
| Alex |
Product managers, also maybe CTOs in some companies of the smaller size, then also some solution architects. In the bigger enterprise companies, whole departments would be responsible for that, so there will be localization program or project managers who would be responsible for introducing the tools like TMS systems. Then, if we speak about some other departments, then also, as you mentioned, Chief Marketing Officer could be the one who would be involved in that decision because they also have to, you know, localize their and translate their marketing content or some content that they have in their CMS. There’s so many stakeholders that need to be involved. |
| Joe |
Yeah. And I think they all have different pains. And if a company like RWS Moravia and Lokalise can highlight those different challenges a company’s going to experience throughout the process while they’re just starting up, that’s where we really add value.
And you talked about design and I want to kind of go back to that and the importance of the local design in the localization workflow. Where does that happen today, usually? Is it happening at the end or is it happening at the beginning, the middle? Where are you guys seeing that in your guys’ workflows? |
| Alex |
I would say that if you are starting out with a product, or if, you know, you’re in an organization that is starting out [with] a completely, you know, different avenue, a different product under your umbrella, then the first thing that happens is that, you know, you come up with this idea, you come up with all the requirements that your product needs to solve.
And then, the next stage of this process would be the design stage. So, we will start with something like low-fidelity mockups and then you will proceed further to more high-fidelity prototypes, some interactive prototypes.
And so, if your organization is already global at that point and your strategic product or initiative that you are working on—you know that sort of the end goal for that is to be the global product—then the multilingual design is something that you have to think about from the day one.
So, I will give you a quick example. So for example, when you’re designing the mockups, and then kind of you validate this idea and then you start to work on the high-fidelity prototypes, then you might know what are the languages, you know, that you will be targeted, where you’ll be rolling out your product.
And so, at this point, let’s assume, you know, it’s obviously US market, it’s European market, and it’s also, you know, some Arabic countries as well. So already at this point, you know that, for example, some languages like Arabic, it’s a right-to-left language. So, it can completely change how you build your interface of your product because otherwise, you might find yourself in a situation when you’ve already rolled it out and then, you know, in the Arabic region the design breaks and you need to make all of these fixes, you need to make all these changes, and it’s a really painful process.
And then also speaking about some European countries like Germany, like Sweden, for example. So, their language is the German and the Swedish language. These are the languages that are lengthier than the English, obviously. And so, you know, it can take as much as up to like 30, 40% of the space in your interface. |
| Joe |
Right. |
| Alex |
And then again, it means that you need to adjust and adapt your layout, how all the elements are placed on the screen. And so, yeah, what I’m trying to say, if you build this—you know that this will be a global product—then you have also the resources to invest in it from the day one. Better you do that, because then when you will be rolling out the, even the MVP of your product to multiple regions, then you will be able to collect the feedback from the different regions and it might be different, right? |
| Joe |
Right. |
| Alex |
And also while you’re doing that, actually translators also act as, you know, as a first layer of the feedback, so when they are translating your product, they can also provide you some valuable and useful insights. |
| Joe |
Great point. |
| Alex |
But also you use it as a sort of, you know, this kind of feedback loop process that you can, you know, already integrate some of the feedback from the day one and you really can iterate at the very early stages.
Now, if you talk about some, let’s say, products that they’ve been doing it in a pretty, you know, standard waterfall process, even not waterfall process but in an agile process when the localization, the most heavily embedded continuous localization, right, so you have kind of, maybe not nailed that, but you have some practices, your teams are working…[it] happens along with the, you know, new features that you’re adding to the product or new functionalities. But then again, sometimes you start translating, for example, without the context or you get your strings from your code repository, right?
So, the developers made some updates; they’ve added some new keys because the product team decided that we need to add this new feature and obviously there’s new text included on that screen, for example. And only then after, you know, your developers pushed all of these new strings to the code repository, your TMS system fetches that and then translators start to translate it.
But what if, you know, when you’ve started to, again, design the whole new feature already at that point, you could bring on board the translators as well, because you know that your product is supporting that amount of languages. Let’s assume, I don’t know, it’s 30 languages. And so, you can again incorporate the translations already at that point, because first of all, again, you will receive some feedback from the translators who would be working on these strings. But second of all, you would be able to spot some issues perhaps with this new functionality or how it, you know, how it’s designed in a product and what are the issues that you will face in, you know, in the different languages once it’s translated.
And it really saves you time. So, once you’ve already did that, it means that there will be less work perhaps for your QA to focus on. And really some other stakeholders will just spend less time and they will face less issues when, you know, you undergo this process and you start with the localization as soon as possible. |
| Joe |
Yeah. And that buyer that just got into localization and listening to this and panicking right now and saying, “Oh, no, I didn’t do this ideal workflow”…what percentage of buyers are you seeing that actually follow this ideal workflow and are just scrambling at the end more and saying, “Oh, no, we got to figure out how to get into these international markets and support them”? |
| Alex |
That’s a very good question. I would say that sometimes when we speak to the prospects, we still find pretty well-known companies who are dealing with the localization in Excel spreadsheets. The majority of the buyers, they’re not yet there in terms of fully integrating the localization into the design process and starting to think about it from the day one, but it’s an iterative process. So, you learn new information, new tools emerge on the market, there are new ways how to handle these problems in a more efficient manner and that’s how you start to adapt your process. And really, I think the key takeaway here, well the listener can take from this conversation, is don’t be afraid to adapt your processes.
It doesn’t mean that they should be done in a way that they’ve been doing that for the last, I dunno, a couple of years. Some process is already deeply embedded into, you know, your workflow, but still, you might have some, again, some side projects. And why don’t you start with this process on your side project, because there are no other dependencies, for example, so nothing stops you from doing that. And then if it proves to be working, if it proves to save you X amount of money, X amount of time for your, you know, employees, then you can try to kind of mirror that process in your main product development and localization efforts. |
| Joe |
Yeah. And I think this is a good topic: how do clients understand how a TMS works and what are they really missing out on? |
| Alex |
Right. So, that’s a very interesting topic because I would also say that different people and different stakeholders think differently about what TMS actually means. So, TMS obviously stands for the translation management system.
But for example, if you ask a language service provider or a translation agency what TMS means, you know, they may picture in their head tools like XTRF or Plunet that help them with a project management aspect of the work that they are doing, for the LSP to work efficiently with the translators, with the freelance translators with the different translation agents and stuff like that, and really streamline the whole process of quoting, invoicing, and really it’s kind of project management aspects of things.
Then if you ask somebody else, like if you ask, for example, a product manager…even, think of this aspect at all of like the whole process of dealing with the vendors and stuff, and they might think about it from a perspective of how I can, again, embed the localization process into my software development cycle.
So, how I can make it work so that my developers should not, you know, do some routine tasks in order to, for the localization process to happen? How I can feed their time in order to be more efficient? And then when you ask some marketing folks for them, it could be really a sort of a single source of truth for all the translations that they’ve done for the different marketing content that is out there. Because what’s interesting about marketing departments is that they usually are the ones with the biggest budgets for the translations because, you know, there’s so much content that they need to translate and localize. And it includes, let’s say, I don’t know, marketing collateral materials like physical, but also digital, some landing pages that they have for the different campaigns. Also, the ad campaigns themselves, even if that’s an ad campaign on the Google Search, for instance.
And so, really a lot of the stuff that they do, and if they are an international company, then they have to translate it all. And so, kind of for them, usually when you ask these folks, “So, what are you looking [for] in the TMS?” They usually say, “We need a single source of truth that would, you know, connect with some of the systems perhaps that we use—a CMS, et cetera—but also that, you know, we can reuse all the translations that we’ve done in the past.
Maybe even they have the resources to do the translations, but they just want to be more efficient in that process of translating the new copies when they emerge. And again, automating that so that they can, for example, pre-translate using the TM leverage, translation memory leverage, and then yeah, adopt this text, and stuff like that. So, yeah, I don’t know if that kind of answers your question directly, but… |
| Joe |
Yeah, I think it brought it full circle to where we started the podcast talking about the different roles. And the TMS is really going to mean something different to each of these roles and we’re able to kind of give each of them a different advantage or a different value, so, no, I think that was great.
Another big topic in our industry is obviously machine translation, neural machine translation as well. And so how is Lokalise tackling NMT and MT in their workflows today? |
| Alex |
I’ve been speaking to some people who’ve been in the industry for quite a long time, and when I asked them about what are the trends in the industry, machine translation and their sort of development is one topic that always pops up. So, it’s never left out at all.
We do integrate with a couple of machine translation engines in order, again, for the translators and those working with the content to be able to leverage these MT engines straight away when they work with a copy. And the interesting thing is that machine translation engines can be used in different ways. So, we’ve seen customers, for example, who have some products, they have their core markets, right? So, for example, they operate in Germany, in France, in UK, in USA, and these are really their core markets. And so here they try to make sure that their quality of the translations is the best possible version. So, they hire the best translators in order to make sure that their quality is top notch.
But then they also have some secondary markets or perhaps some markets where they just want to test out how the audience will react. And they are just using the machine translation engines and they don’t bother even to, you know, post-edit the results because what they want to do is they want a very quick turnaround and they want to understand how this region will perform.
So, they really are looking at the analytics of it. And then if it is doing well, then, you know, they can invest more money, they can collaborate with a translation agency and make sure that their content is of the better quality out there.
And so, that’s one use case, which is pretty interesting. But the second one is obviously how we can improve the output of the machine translation engines. |
| Joe |
Yeah. And I think you touched on some good points of MT is, one, it can be an easy way and an affordable way to enter a new market and test the waters. And I think also what’s important to our listeners is maybe even tier your content: tier one, tier two, tier three. And those tier threes, you can start to explore machine translation within…maybe it’s content that you wanted translated previously, but now that you have this option out there, you can bring that in and start translating more content and support content and stuff like that. And then the revenue-generating content, use those human translators for, and that transcreation or that content creation. |
| Alex |
Right. |
| Joe |
An important part though, if you are using machine translation is a lot of people are using machine translation with post-edit. How’s the review process working with the Lokalise workflow? |
| Alex |
Right. What we do have in our platform is the possibility to define sort of custom statuses for the strings.
And if we talk about, you know, some standard, simple workflows when there is, for example, a translation and revision, it’s really easy to determine what is the status of the strings. But when you start to automate lots of the stuff, for example, pre-translating something with a translation memory leverage that you have and then passing it to the translators and then maybe applying the machine translation output to the other strings and have somebody who is reviewing the output, right? And doing some post-editing.
And for example, again, since we’ve touched on the topic of you can have multiple regions and you have different workflows. And then, kind of create more sophisticated workflows in a sense, maybe for the different languages you are creating different workflows and stuff.
And then, speaking about the whole perspective of translators post-editing the output of the MT engines, then I would say that there’s some language resources that translators have, like again, terminology, like the translation memory from the other projects, like commenting section, like also context of that string so that they can, you know, work with that output and really kind of, sort of apply all the information that they have and make sure that it corresponds to the tone of voice, to the style, to the context that they see on their screen, you know, for that particular string for that particular customer.
And make the MT output more personalized and, you know, something that would sound like a real translation that takes in check on the, you know, the needs of the end user, but not just the plain MT engine output. |
| Joe |
Why don’t we have you give us your opinion on trends and predictions on the tech industry and where the tools are going? |
| Alex |
Right. So, I would say that, yeah, one trend obviously is the sort of development of the different MT engines, right? And again, sort of the machine learning and artificial intelligence that can be applied in that specific niche. And really trying to make sure that, you know, these engines are able to learn from what they have processed.
So yeah, I would say the second trend when maybe there is some mergers happening or maybe some new players on the market emerge that would try to really sort of create the whole kind of ecosystem in place. And I don’t know, maybe create some marketplaces where other tools sort of plug in in order to kind of provide this whole experience. So that’s, yeah, that’s the second take.
The third element where I see maybe the trend where the industry can evolve is sort of the education. So, how do we educate new players, new companies, new people who are entering this industry in order to learn maybe some fundamentals, some basics and be prepared to, you know, what’s to come? And so, I think that there’s pretty limited amount of information out there. So, for example, localization—I know there are some courses in the universities, but I don’t think there are many of them. I also don’t think that there’s lots of content, you know, some courses and stuff like that. I feel that there is some gap in terms of the knowledge that is provided, even though there are definitely some players out there, and some, again, some people, some individuals who try to educate others and stuff like that. I see that this whole kind of space should also evolve in the future in order for everybody to, again, grow and in order for industry to step on the next level. |
| Joe |
Yeah. Those courses that can support the people like us, that were just going to school for, say, marketing and a support course that helps for you to understand the more the international markets and stuff like that. I hear you there, as there are definitely universities out there that focus on just localization, but it could probably be more integrated into our everyday universities and ones that aren’t dedicated specifically to that. That’s great. |
| Alex |
Yeah, absolutely. Because there is this concept of, you know, the global citizen and from what we can see, like all the companies are becoming global and, you know, that’s why we need to support it with more resources, more materials, more courses, for example, in order for everybody to feel comfortable in this global citizen’s shoes. |
| Joe |
I want to end the podcast with you just giving a little bit of advice to someone entering the industry and specifically those people that may not have experience with the industry, just learning about it. And what’s some advice you would give to them on jumping in? |
| Alex |
Yeah, I would say that this is something that is very similar in the whole kind of product role, right? You should always be curious about, you know, what’s happening in the industry, what are the ways that things are done, whether the, again, some more standard workflows, what are the more advanced workflows, what are the different people that are in need of the localization and what are their goals?
And, I would say that at this point, basically, since there are so many, you know, again, people, so many tools, so many different processes and every company is sort of at the different stage of the localization maturity, there is no golden rule of thumb for anybody, and everybody’s learning. Everybody is improving their processes. Everybody’s evolving.
And for somebody who’s just entering the market, you have to be curious and you have to try to step in the shoes of all these different people and try to understand how different companies tackle different problems differently, and then apply your experience once you gather that to decide what is the best for your company, for your client or anything else.
So, you should not be afraid of what’s to come. |
| Joe |
Yeah. You’re bringing in a new point of view that might help change the industry. |
