Community And The Language Industry

[00:00:03] Speaker A: Well, hello and welcome to Localization Today. This time we have what we call an unscripted localization today. But as you know, this is where we explore how languages, language in general, technology and community converge to unlock ideas for everyone everywhere. I'm Eddie Arrieta, CEO at Multilingual Media Today to talk about all things localization, community, technology. Joining us is Alison Furch, executive director at Gala, and I think that works so much better. How are you doing, Alison, today? [00:00:43] Speaker B: I'm great, thank you. It's good to see you. Nice to chat with you again. [00:00:47] Speaker A: It is wonderful to connect and, of course, at a very amazing time. I think last time we saw one, another was in Berlin. Yeah. World ready? The first. First. World ready. Of course. [00:01:01] Speaker B: First one. [00:01:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. How did you feel? [00:01:05] Speaker B: Well, I'll be frank. It was. It was a. It was both fantastic and disappointing. It was fantastic because it. It went really well. The content was excellent. It was very well received, but it was a lot smaller than we expected it to be. And that was a little bit of a disappointment for us because we want more people in the room and more people experiencing this cool, unique experience that is a Gallup conference. [00:01:36] Speaker A: No, I get it. And of course, in that mix, you still have to take decisions about the future. I guess the elephant in the room is the question that someone made to you. We'll see how this goes. But is this idea that you should just quit. This is. The pie is shrinking. There's no opportunity, nothing that's happening. Less people. Why should you even keep going? Right. [00:02:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, it's an interesting question, and I think, look, without being judgmental, if people choose to leave the industry because they don't like the way it's go where it's going, fine. That's your choice. That's your decision. There's lots of other things to do and a lot of other ways to apply your unique talents in this World Gala as a trade association, like the nonprofit association that's here with a mission to support this industry. Like, we're not going anywhere. So, you know, there's this famous Vince Lombardi quote about winners never quit and quitters never win. It's very cliche, but it's also true. So what's our job? Our job is to support the members and in the community that are out there trying to evolve and trying to do the transformation that's required in this. In this phase. So we're not quitting. We're not going anywhere. And we think, in fact, there's a lot of value in sticking Together and being a community that supports the transformation and supports one another. [00:03:10] Speaker A: What's the value? What's the value? What's the transformation that unfolds? And what's the value in that transformation, that sticking together, like you put it, which is community. I see so many elements, of course, like observation and the multilingual side. We live through it, right? Like we're writing articles, we're receiving articles, and we observe things on full. We observe roles transformed, which changes the way in which people do things. The way in which people are doing things now, like let's call it the culture of our industry have changed in the past three years that I've been around people. People don't do media as they used to. Now everyone is so much more sophisticated. People have their own events, people have their own webinars, people have so many partnerships. So things have changed significantly. So I definitely resonate. But I'd love for you to tell us your position on what's the value and what's transforming from your standpoint. [00:04:08] Speaker B: Well, I'll take the second half of that question first. And you know, what's transforming is it's happening before our eyes. And so if you ask anybody, where are we going to be in three years, they don't know with any degree of certainty. But one of the things that I did this year was I kind of looked at what all of the analysts were saying, and that includes CSA research and Nimzi and Slater and some other independent thinkers. And they seem to converge around a couple of themes. One of them is that it's no longer really about the conversion of language. It's about the conversion of content. And so it's becoming very content oriented. The way I've also heard it talked about is the shifting left of localization, becoming more integrated. And the way my brain likes to think about it is that we're seeing it integrated into layers. And this is supported by the technology now into layers that didn't used to care or think about it. So, you know, product development, so production, content creation. Yes, the whole technology layer, also the delivery layer and then the layer that happens after the delivery when you're interacting with customers. And it's now able to be integrated into all these different layers. When it used to be something that was just bolted on at the end and related only to like the language of a specific piece of content, now it's this whole kind of orchestration of that multilingual content, multilingual communication. So that's kind of where we see the transformation going. And then in terms of the value. It's like if you're the only person in the room and you're sitting there alone looking at things and you're making conclusions and you're taking actions, you just lack sort of. Well, some people don't, but lack certainty. Is this the right direction? Is this the right choice? It's so much nicer to say, what are you seeing and what are you seeing and what's been your experience? And what did you try? Oh, that failed. Oh, that worked. Oh, but what about this thing? And when you have a community, that's what you do. You get all these people around a table to talk about the new changes and the new technology and the new way of doing things, and the new stakeholders, by the way, and they talk about them and they figure it out, and they experiment and they report back, and then that's how the evolution happens. I think community is absolutely essential during a time of transformation like we're in right now. [00:06:42] Speaker A: You, of course, as an association, feel it from within. Correct. And you feel the ones that change industries. You feel the newcomers. You feel the ones that withstand the storm. And storm sounds very dramatic and negative, but, you know, whichever way you think of storms, I like rain because I live in a really hot area. So rain means it's good. Rain is good. And yeah, it'd be really interesting to know from within. Gala, what are you seeing and what does it feel like, that transformation in terms of the people and who they are? [00:07:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll answer that kind of on a couple of layers. Like, let's start with the kind of the bad news. The bad news is that, you know, the foundational part of this industry, which has been translators and freelance linguists, their jobs are probably changing most radically or have changed most radically. And they've been under pressure for years, you know, especially with MT and then machine translation, post editing. And now they're being asked to do complete. You know, it's more like validation work than it is actual translation. So that transformation is huge. It's real. A lot of people can't cope with the margin pressure. They're really feeling the brunt of it, for sure. Our community is mainly comprised of the next layer, which is companies that are using those human resources for the purpose of multilingual communication. So practically speaking, we took a survey in the beginning part of this year. We called it our economic indicator survey. And it's a bunch of benchmarking questions that we've asked year over year. So what we discovered is that, well, two things that I'LL point out one, there's a lot of people still doing business as usual, actually. And it depends on the region and it depends on the vertical and the type of content that, that they're working with. But there's still a lot of people just kind of doing business as usual. Then there's a lot of people that are feeling margin pressure that they, that they absolutely pin on AI, mainly expectations of clients related to AI. And so what we're seeing is maybe this kind of bunch of front runners, if you will. And they're the early adopters and they're very tech savvy and they're creating their own tools, they're creating their own agents, they're experimenting, they're very tech forward. They're doing a lot of integrations. They're kind of like the cutting edge. They're mature or sophisticated, if you will. And then there's this long tail behind them where you're seeing various stages of adaptation. You know, I would say everybody's at least at the awareness stage, thankfully. You know, that said, I have talked to some owner operators that are, you know, closer to retirement age than anything else, and they're not, they're not planning to change. They're saying, I'm just going to do a managed decline, close it down, retire. I'm done. Fine, that's totally legitimate. Then you've got some other folks that are super eager to take this on and to like, crack the nut, if you will, figure out how to make this work for them and for their company. It's fascinating. I mean, it's a challenging time, but I also think it's really interesting. [00:10:19] Speaker A: You know what's fascinating to me, there are so many companies that I've met that are, that offer a service in our industry to like a big, let's put it that way, a big corporate, big enterprises, a big enterprise. And they don't even know they are in the industry. Like in Colombia. Nobody. Well, I wouldn't say nobody, but I've met two professors from university at the Antioquia in Medellin, and they are like, I don't know, language companies in Colombia don't know that we are industry. They're like not, they are not Homo sapiens sapiens. They don't know that. They know that they are part of a language industry that has associations, and the associations here don't really work in the same way. So they are missing out an entire pool. And I noticed that this is across several different industries in Colombia. There is not, not a culture of Building community. And then where it's happening, they are thriving. They're very prosperous. So I was like, there's probably a lot of companies and this to say that in the services they offer in Colombia, sure, they could use some AI, but they are like, very human heavy. And they're still thriving because the curve, like the learning curve and the technology curve is so steep still. It's still like five, 10 years away. There's a long period of adaptation and there is a lot of unawareness deal. That surprises me. [00:11:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I was talking with a member last week that has offices in Taiwan and also in Shanghai. And the comparison between their two offices and the clients that they each serve is like day and night. You know, they've got the. The clients that the Shanghai office is serving are really sophisticated, mature. And then you've got these. The. The clients that the Taiwanese office is serving, they have, like, loads of tech debt. They're not even really thinking about AI yet. They barely have any mature processes in place. So, you know, you talk about that being the case in Colombia. I think that there are definitely cultural differences around the world in kind of the understanding and appreciation of an association or of a community. I'm sure some anthropologist has. Has looked at this or written about it. You know, trade associations like GALA originated from trades truly, where tradesmen, kind of tradesmen got together into groups and cohorts. So if you were a blacksmith or if you were a tanner or if you were a. A miller, whatever, you guys were talking about how you did your jobs and what you were. What you were charging. We don't. We're not allowed to do that today. That's antitrust. But anywho. Yeah. Around the world you see these different variations in approach to community. I'm an evangelist, like a community evangelist. I don't understand why somebody wouldn't want to be part of a community. [00:13:19] Speaker A: And it would need to be, then understood community in many different senses, many different layers. Which of those layers and senses do you think are important for our industry? And I think there's, of course, for you, I'm sure it is the same way, but there's a huge difference between, like, human gatherings and community. Like, one's not equate the other. And community has probably certain ideal characteristics that result into all the benefits that you're mentioning. What are some of those, like, nuances to a good community that provides the exact value we're talking about? [00:14:02] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that, like, a focus on collective problem solving, it requires a degree of openness and open mindedness, which means that people who might normally see each other as competitors have to set that aside. So sometimes we call that coopetition, you know, where you've got people, competitors cooperating with one another. I think that being able to speak with other professionals who are up against the same things that you're up against is really helpful. And what that requires is an, is an openness and a willingness to share knowledge, to share, know how to be a little bit vulnerable about failures. For example, like we did this and it didn't work, or we spend way more money than we thought we would on this project or whatever. I think that helps. It's not just about. I wrote an article on LinkedIn not too long ago comparing a conference and a community. Because a lot of people who aren't members of gala, they don't know that we do something practically every week. Okay. It's a year round community. They only know us because of our conference. So they'll say things or I'll have people tell me like, oh, I've never been to a gala before. And I'm like, well, you can come every week. You know, we do something all the time and you don't have to spend a lot of money. So I think the other element for me, for community, is that kind of consistent showing up. It's not just once a year or twice a year, although that's great too. And people get together in person and there's a lot of friendships and there's a lot of camaraderie and there's a lot of fun, but there's also a lot of problem solving and learning happening. And then when you're online together and you're showing up repeatedly, maybe to a special interest group or you're coming to webinars or, you know, that's when community combined with consistency, I think really produces some value. So I guess to summarize for you, that would be. And openness and willingness to share, showing up consistently and not conflating, you know, partying with community even though they both have a place. [00:16:27] Speaker A: You're going to be so proud of this segue. And now that you're talking about openness, how about we talk about your open house? [00:16:33] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:16:35] Speaker A: Like, it was so corny. Yeah. My son would not be happy. My son would be like, no, you're just what they say now. [00:16:43] Speaker B: That's dad. That's dad humor. I love, I love dad humor. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for asking about the open house. Because what we're doing in the month of September. And today we're recording this is August 31st. So September starts tomorrow. And for the whole month of September, we're basically giving a free month of membership. And so a person can sign up for a free professional trial membership or a company. You can sign up for a free company trial membership. And we're basically giving you access to everything. There's three webinars in September. There's one special interest group meeting, which is actually from the client sig, the enterprise sig. And there is. Right. And then you get access to the whole resource center. And the resource center is our archive. It's where every recording goes, every webinar, every conference session, every special interest group meeting, all of the articles. And so you have access to the resource center, to the live events. The only exclusion is the Gala Academy. That's happening also in September. And so it's free. We're not requiring a credit card. After the 30 days are done, the membership's gonna end. Absolutely. We're gonna invite you to sign up for a real membership. But if you don't like it, you tried it, and that's all we are asking. [00:18:03] Speaker A: Just give it, Give it a go. [00:18:05] Speaker B: Yeah, give it a go. Come on in and see what it's like inside the membership. [00:18:11] Speaker A: So how does it work? So let' say I'm interested. I go to the website. [00:18:15] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:18:16] Speaker A: And then I say I register. [00:18:17] Speaker B: Yeah. If you don't already have a user account, you create a free user account. It's your, your email and your name. And then you register and you basically buy a free trial membership. And we do professional memberships, which are for individuals, and then we do company memberships, which are for a whole company. So if you have a staff of 23, you get them all to create user accounts. They say that they work for your company, and now they all have access to the membership. And that's the way Gala membership works. Those two different kinds. We also do nonprofit pricing. And anyway, you. You sign up, and then I'm going to activate them all this afternoon. And then the doors are open, you come on in, you register for whatever events you want to attend live. You go into the resource center and you look around and you watch some things and you read some things, and you just see what it's like to be part of the Gala member community and see what we offer and why. Why it's valuable. Because we, we know it's valuable. We think and we know. [00:19:20] Speaker A: Yeah, that's, that's, that's great. Thank you. Very, very generous. And. And then I sign up, I get my membership, it won't charge me anything. And then at the end of the month, you will invite us to say, hey, what? What did you think? [00:19:35] Speaker B: It'll just. Right. The membership will just expire, your access will close, the doors will close, and we'll say, what did you think? Do you. Do you want to join Gala? If so, here's your menu of options. [00:19:45] Speaker A: That is a wonderful idea. Congratulations on. [00:19:49] Speaker B: Thanks. [00:19:50] Speaker A: The Open House. What's the name of it? Is it the Gala Open House or. We're already Open House Gala? [00:19:55] Speaker B: No, Gala. Yeah. We're calling it, like, the membership drive and Open House. And in the United States, where I'm from, this is the time of year that this happens. We do things called Open House. Sometimes they call it back to school night. And it's essentially a time for parents to go into the classrooms and see what it is that their kids are doing in classrooms. They meet the teachers, they learn about the lessons and the syllabus and whatever the kids are going to be doing that year. And this is sort of a play on that because it's September and it's back to school and it's Open House, and you get to just come on in and check it out. [00:20:33] Speaker A: That is really wonderful. And I'm expecting many people to try it, and then maybe we'll meet again in Lisbon. Yes, Lisbon. And I know, I don't know, but it's exciting. I like Lisbon. I think it's a great city. I loved it. [00:20:48] Speaker B: The last time we were in Lisbon was in Gala hosted near Lisbon in 2011. So that'll be, you know, 16 years since we've been back to Portugal. Yeah. Yeah. [00:21:02] Speaker A: Things have changed everywhere. Right? [00:21:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:21:05] Speaker A: That is. That is really interesting, Alison. And of course, we can leave without asking you about the future. You're seeing this transformation. You see the role communities playing. What do you see? Tell us everything. Stock market now. I'm kidding. [00:21:22] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:21:23] Speaker A: How do you see? Do you feel optimistic? Do you see? I am. I am personally optimistic. There are certain things that I believe we have to be pessimistic about, and it's just the way things are. But of course, you are right there, right there, listening to the companies and the leaders. [00:21:43] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. And I do. I have a lot of conversations with members, and I always am asking, like, what are you seeing? What is your experience? And I would say that in the last three months especially, I've been hearing signals that make me feel optimistic. I've heard from companies that basically are saying, I think we've finally got it. We've got it figured out for now. They've made a lot of changes. They've had. This is the hard part. A lot of them have had to do reduction in staff. It's true. And that's the part that, like you say, yeah, we have to be pessimistic about back to where we started this conversation, and the room is shrinking a little bit. At the same time, I think that we are going to begin to see more connections with adjacent localization, adjacent professionals. So, for example, when we talked earlier about these different layers and localization being infused into the product layer and into the publishing layer or the content delivery layer, whatever, those. Those layers all have professionals with their own set of skills. Now those professionals are having to become a bit conversant in multilingual and localization speak. Okay. But I think the real value is that localization professionals, they have such a unique set of skills and knowledge about culture and language that they. They now need to kind of partner with some of these adjacent teams to learn a little from them and to be able to sit at the tables where the conversations are happening and weigh in on the linguistics and the culture and the technology of it all. So I think that, yes, we're reducing kind of the traditional workforce. The linguists are absolutely hurting and feeling it for sure. I think, though, that we're going to be welcoming some kind of local, Adjacent localization, adjacent people into the community as well. We certainly want to learn from them, and we think we've got a few things to teach them as well. So one thing GALA is working on is trying to do these collaborations with other associations. Like, we did something with Project Management Institute. We've done something with the International association of Privacy Professionals. We're always looking for different kind of adjacencies, getting marketing specialists, getting engineering. You know, the family's also expanding in a sense. So those are some of the. Yeah, those are some of the things that I'm seeing. And I think that the people who signaled some optimism, they're the ones that are kind of walking that walk or doing that reality. Like they're adapting their service offerings and their portfolios for the new demands, and they're finding niches and they're finding basically ways to add value. So I'm optimistic. It's still early days. We don't really talk about AI anymore because it's just. It's everywhere. It's part of the fabric. [00:24:54] Speaker A: And that's. And that's. That's that today, of course, Very optimistic myself. And you are right about adjacency, you know, looking at other industries. And I've had the opportunity this year to look closely into gaming, for example, and the adjacencies have always been there. Now they're just a little more obvious. The rights is almost like what shrank was a lot of. I don't want to say fluffy in a negative way, but a lot of repetition was taking place there in ways of doing things, in forms of doing things. And then those who really care about languages, I see them working still in languages. And that's very interesting to see that. Those resilient professionals that remind us that the community relies on all the different characters to do what they're supposed to do. [00:25:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And we really do think there's a place for the linguist who can exert or, you know, applied judgment. Right. So there's going to be plenty of use cases where that's not required. But we think especially as kind of risk take center stage where. Where like now brands are on the line in a way that they never were before. You know, if you're creating multilingual content, like the whole content ecosystem has changed now with localization being integrated throughout it, and risk is just a big deal. Who's going to put their name on that? Did you allow that? So this is where the human judgment comes in. And there's a lot of people writing about this and talking about this. This is not any kind of unique idea here. It's out there. People are already saying it and have been for a while, but I think we're beginning to see it. [00:26:45] Speaker A: Yeah, we're beginning to see more, the more obvious. A machine won't replace you. Someone using the machine will replace you. And in some cases, it's ourselves. And it was ourselves, in my case, I'm sure, being replaced by a version of Eddie. A multilingual and a multilingual version that embraces what it can embrace and respects what needs to respect in an editorial newsroom. And that definitely resonates. You continue doing what you do at the core, the essence of what you. [00:27:18] Speaker B: You know, I want to ask you a question about that because it's so interesting. We're talking about. AI is just. It's. It's part of the fabric. It's pervasive. I find myself now, like, you and I were talking about a comment that I was writing on LinkedIn. And. And I'm like, I want to make darn sure that you all know I wrote that. And so I'm wondering, like, from you Know, like multi, you know, we all use it daily. Helps us whatever. But does it, does it occupy, like, what do they say, living rent free in your brain about, like where that line of voice and authenticity is? I'm just curious. [00:27:57] Speaker A: I think about that all totally. Yeah, I think it's. I think it's a profound question. We're lucky that we have a lot of human writers available. And that is really good. I believe that is the secret sauce. And the secret sauce is how do we use AI for the things that need to be articulated. Automations for certain activities, not for everything. The automation of certain tasks in particular. But the creative element ends up being the differentiator. So we are very bullish on the use of technology, but we are way more bullish. Like diameter. I don't even know how to say that word in diameter. Almente. More, more, more valuable than even in some particular cases, humans with technology. I think in some particular cases, the human would. I would always. I would always invest in the human. [00:29:02] Speaker B: I know, right. Well, I think that this dovetails with what we were talking about earlier with trust being a. That's a premium service now. You know, like, if I can trust in you or you can trust in my business or my output or my content, like, trust is. That's the, that's the gold standard now. And it's hard to come by. [00:29:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And it takes effort. You. You need to build it, you need to pay attention. And paying attention is. Is time. Right. It's our biggest luxury. [00:29:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:29:34] Speaker A: To pay attention, you have to spend time, whether the insights are coming from the sky or from a machine or from a person, or from a mixture of all of it. At the end of the day, you know that creativity and innovation only comes from devoting time to those things. And I think a multilingual media, we have stayed true. We want to stay true. Like, like you are staying true to community, of course, the readers, by staying true to the essence of what we do, which is to communicate in compelling ways. And I think a magazine is very compelling for certain scenarios. It's amazing. It's the best way to get in contact, to put something out there. And we've discovered that podcasts are great and that flexibility, probably something that's part of who we are. And that's why, like, this sort of conversation today is so much more valuable than other than others. That might be, you know, going in another direction. But. But I think I like that approach and I see trust, like you said, trust being what we're receiving from a Lot of our sponsors that say, you know, we are part of this. We're all here. We're all here because we know this can work, and we know there is a lot of value, and we know that it's important to and for the ecosystem to contain so many different voices and so many different personalities. I think that's healthy, and I think there needs to be, like, much more of it, much more diversity of it from so many different places, and that would enrich the community. I think. I'm hopeful because I continue to meet new people that I've not even suspected exist in our industry. And I thought by, like, the first year, I will have met everyone. I'm not even close. [00:31:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:29] Speaker A: I'm not even close. More people keep coming. Yeah. So I'm grateful. I'm grateful for what I see in the industry, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to be part of such a transformational period that definitely tests the best. And it will be remembered. Kind of like those moments where professionals could have done certain things, didn't do them, and then you'll. You'll see at the end. [00:31:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Today, I know we're living through interesting times, and I feel like this industry has been able to say that for a long time, but we really are. And we still are. Yeah. But. [00:32:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:32:06] Speaker B: Well, thank you for. I like, I appreciate that multilingual gives voice to a lot of different associations and a lot of different organizations. I appreciate that very much because, you know, we do live in a pay to play kind of a world. And so the fact that you guys support nonprofits and support associations is great. Thank you. [00:32:32] Speaker A: You're really welcome. And we believe that's what the industry needs. [00:32:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it does. [00:32:37] Speaker A: Robust ecosystems have the closest thing to true journalism that it can get. And I think because of the nature of our industry, we can stay truly journalistic. And, you know, we all agree that that's a great approach. So I hope that we can continue supporting associations. Well, thank you. Thank you, everyone who has listened. And Allison, of course, thank you for listening to localization today. Today, Alison Furch with gala, talking about the open house that they will have. If you have a company, an individual, you're an individual. And you want to take advantage of the amazing opportunities with gala. Join no risk. At the end of the process, they'll say, what? What do you think? What you like. So please take this into consideration. First, activity starting soon, it's gonna be open today is August 31st. It'll be open starting tomorrow, September 1st. Right, Alison? [00:33:36] Speaker B: Yep. And the first event is on the [00:33:38] Speaker A: third and the first event is on the third of September. Please continue listening to Localization today. Catch new episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. I'm Eddie Arrieta with Multilingual Media. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Goodbye, everyone.