Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: I'm the media production manager for Ludeo Studios. It's a Ludeus communication company based out of the Netherlands. I'm also here representing a tool or a new company that we're launching called Kangaroo, which is why I've got this little teddy with me, which people are willing to kill. I've got to be very careful who gets these later because everyone wants one. But, yeah, we're launching a new QA2, Vadesca's kangaroo and ludeo Studios. But I'm here to do a fundraiser for Translators Without Borders.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Fantastic. And of course, you know, I invited you to talk here to talk more about the fundraiser.
It's going to be tonight, 90s theme.
Very incredible. I'm going to show it to those that are looking at the video. Look at this. And we're gonna be doing it at the amazing. What's the name of the. Of the place?
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Hurley's.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Hurley's Irish Pub. So for those that couldn't come to gala, this is what you missed. Tell us more about this fundraiser.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: So in long story short, in 2016, I met Amy Ansari at gala in New York. And I was blown away by. I, I was new to the industry, I was blown away by what they do, what translator borders do.
In 2017, Gala came to Amsterdam, which was kind of like a home conference for us. So we said that we should be the company to. To organize a fundraiser. So we asked if we could do a fundraiser.
Of course, Amy was delighted to have it. Amy Rose was working there at the time. They thought any help they can get would be fantastic.
When it came to actually doing a fundraiser at the conference, I ran out of ideas, I ran out of time. So I shaved my beard off. I got other people to shave their beards off. I got people to dye their hair, henna tattoos, and it was a lot of fun. It was something incredibly silly, but it was for something very important.
And then, since then, we're a small company, we can't make financial donations at the scale that would make any significant difference to what they want to do.
We can't donate services. They don't need Dutch or German translation necessarily, or the Nordic. We can't do anything in a like for like. But what we can give them is our time.
So since 2017, we've done a fundraiser at every gala for Translators Without Borders, Clear Global. And we try to come up with a different theme every year.
A different target, a different location, trying to get. Get people to engage with it. The most important thing for translation Borders is to get attention. They suffer. The same thing that all translation agencies suffer from is you have to justify your existence.
You need to explain what you're doing with the money that you have, with the budget that you have, where that money's going to, why you're going there, why you should invest in it. They help so many other aid agencies get their work.
Those aid agencies have an easier time to justify what they do. Whereas translators, with our borders, they facilitate so much.
And like all translation companies, we all suffer with the same visibility issue. So anything we can do to help them out with that, I think it has to be done.
I feel it on a deep level that we morally have to help them as much as we possibly can for Gala. Gala have been great at facilitating us and helping us to set this up. They get an extra networking event. The people here get an extra event to go out to. We get visibility, we get recognition for what we're doing, which is above and beyond the time and the effort that it takes to do it. But it's all about Translators Without Borders. What the work they do is crucial. And with what's happening south of the border here and the cuts to US Aid, they're suffering the translators world borders. They're trying to move from being a reactive, going into regions that are experiencing devastation to being proactive and trying to harness the power of AI to be able to create tools to deal with niche languages, to deal with forgotten, marginalized languages and the work that they're doing.
Yeah, it's crucial.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: And of course, if we stop a little bit on that topic, tell us a little bit more about the work that's been done. And we understand that a lot of these work is where funding, when there is no funding, where there is no money to be made, where there are no profits to be made. So there is less of a commercial incentive to be there. Tell us a little bit more about those places where Translations Without Borders decided.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: I will try to tell you something about this. I again, I'm not working. I don't work for Translators Without Borders or Clear Global. So I don't want to misrepresent exactly what they're doing. I can tell you in broad strokes what they're trying to do. But like you said, the regions, the languages, the places that need this most are. It's not the sexy language, it's not the big language. It's not about volume, it's not about sales, it's not about a profit. It's about people, and it's about access to Information.
And there are so many people around the world who need access to information. They need for, for health reasons, for security issues.
And it's, it's just, it's humankind, it's what we always do. It's the marginalized. It's the people who get forgotten, who are forgotten about the, the people that are not profitable. It's, it's, it's a horrible way to think about it. But there's a reason why these areas, these languages are not profitable.
People don't invest, they don't put the time into it and they don't do that because the psych. What's the point? And that's why it's so important that there are organizations like Clear Global, like Translators Without Borders, that are focused on helping developing regions and trying to make the playing field a little bit more even. And the only way to do that is to give people access to information for their development, for their healthcare, for security, for all these different reasons. I would love to be able to tell you more specifically, but I'm afraid I can't. You're gonna have to ask Amy or Stella or get in contact with twv.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. And I understand, you know, we are here to make sure that we give as much support as we can to the fundraiser as we do. This is an important topic for Kangaroo. Tell us more about our friend who's visiting us. Andrew is just a real sneaky blog. Yes, yes.
[00:06:49] Speaker A: So we work as, we work a lot with other language service providers. We do Dutch and German and the Nordics primarily.
But we work with almost all the tools. We have licenses for everything. We have different file formats. And doing your qa, it's a pain in the ass to have to convert to get it into Excel or CSV, whatever. That costs time, it costs effort, it stops the process. So our in House team, Eric, Eric Bogaard, our one of our developers in Ludeo Studios, he started fixing some of the problems. He started trying to come up with coding issues, ways to convert different file formats. And over about four or five years, he's developed this tool called Kangaroo. We've been using it in house for about three years and we find it amazing, but that's our opinion. So what I'm here, I'm asking people to trial it for a month, give it a go, see if it can be useful for them. It'll open almost any file format. You could do your multilingual qa, single language qa. You could do, use it as a copywriter and we love it. We, we think it's brilliant, but again, I don't know until other people start to see, start to try it. So there's got to be a kind of a trial by fire, but yes, kangaroo, eu. And at the moment, if you're here, there's a gala code gala 2025. If you put that in, you get a one month license for free. Just try it, see if it works. Okay. Well, this is a weird plug, but thank you very much, Eddie.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: No, thank you. Thank you. And you know, historically, another Dutch from the industry, a legend from the industry, Marjolaine Grud, the previous CEO of Multilingual. She said in one of the interviews that we had that this industry is less of an industry and more of a community.
And clearly, you know, from what you do professionally and what you do at the company, supporting this fundraiser is important for personal and professional reasons. Is there in between the lines invitation to other members of the industry to not only, you know, be involved with the fundraiser and have fun at the event, but also get involved in other forms. There are other places where you can do that. This is one of those. But it also feels that it's very important for our community to be part of this and engage with this.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it can't be overstated how important community is to this industry.
Coming to the conferences, it's. It's like a warm blanket. You're. It's. It's a really, really nice feeling. The people, the people here are almost everybody that you ask where you from, they can't answer. I'm from here because nine out of 10 of us are from one place, but we live somewhere else and we're working with another place.
It's. It's a really. It's an. It' it's possibly a too open community, but it's.
Yeah. Jesus. I'm trying to, trying to find a way to word this. I think the localization events, these, the. Your galas, your Lokwals, your ALCs, ATAs, all of these different conferences are crucial, but they're all struggling. They're all fighting for the same eyeballs. They're all fighting to keep alive in a very unstable situation.
These events only exist because companies are willing to come and sponsor and actually invest in it. And all of the sponsors, these people are the reasons that the conference can happen. And I think they don't always get the credit they deserve for all the investment they put into it.
From a community point of view, from a sharing point of view, from knowledge sharing, but also just for support for each other, it's vital. But the only way you're going to get anything out of a conference is to be as fully invested as you can be. You can't, I'm going to swear, you can't half ass it. You can't just kind of sign up and trot around the base. You can go session to session to session. I mean, there's some brilliant speakers at the conference and. But every conference is going to have brilliant speakers. Every conference is going to have really, really interesting topics to talk about. It's the networking, it's the people, it's the meeting at the coffee station at 8 o'clock in the morning, after going to bed at 2 at night. They're the moments that you build up real relationships with people, real, I mean, proper friendships with people.
And so that's something I firmly believe, and I've believed from day one, that if you want to get anything out of a conference, you've got to put it in. So put in the time, put in the effort, do stuff to make it interesting, do stuff to make it fun. And that's what we hope to do with the fundraiser as well. That's something that we like to give to the conference, to the community and if people can have a bit of fun at it, then that's great.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: Excellent.
Final thoughts for those that are going to listen to this afterwards, after the event, the fundraiser is over. Are there any final thoughts you want to share before we go?
[00:11:59] Speaker A: Yeah. What I would say there's a lot of companies, especially small, medium sized LSPs that are feeling maybe a little bit worried about what's happening at the moment, maybe scared about where the industry is going.
What I would say is don't think that you're alone in it. If you are freaking out, talk to people, talk to, get involved with the communities. You don't have to come to a conference. Conferences can be quite expensive, but there are communities of people in all of the countries that we work in. Reach out, talk to people, just bitch, moan, go for a drink, get out of the office.
But don't suffer in silence. Talk to people. If you are suffering, if you are struggling, get out there and yeah, get out of that bubble and sort of talk to people. You'll find that misery loves come, misery loves company on one level, but at the same time a lot of the people that are here have faced and are facing these problems and might have solutions, might have helped. And if nothing else, a problem shared is a problem halved.
So I would say talk to people We're a communication industry, but we're not always the best at talking and talking honestly about what you're struggling with. But it's going to help people, and that's what I would say. If you're listening to it now, get involved. See if there's something. So next year, they've announced Gala is going to be in Berlin.
That's going to be epic. It's a. It's a nice, great city to visit if you've never been. If you're in Europe, it's easy to get to by train, although German trains might not be the best way to do it. But I. I'm Dutch, so we're spoiled. I'm not Dutch. I live in the Netherlands. And we're spoiled by our trains. I'm. I'm starting to ramble now because I'm thinking now if I get into Berlin for next year.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: All right, thank you, everyone, for listening. This was our conversation with Andrew Hickson, media production manager at Ludeo. We discuss about Gala 2025, our initial impressions, and also about the around the world fundraiser for Translators Without Borders and Clear Global, happening tonight here in Montreal. Andrew, thank you so much for your time.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: Pleasure. Thank you very much. Eddie, come on.
