Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, welcome to Localization Today, the show where we talk to the people driving innovation in the language and localization industry.
We are looking to explore how language professionals make products and services resonate across cultures and markets. My name is Eddie Arrieta. I'm the CEO here at Multilingual Media. And today we are joined by Teresa Toronho, Localization manager at Molt. With over a decade of experience at companies like Workday, KLOOK and now molt, Teresa has helped build and optimize localization workflows that connect global audiences while strengthening collaboration across product, marketing, legal and customer teams. She's a champion of lean teams, smart processes and human focused localization. Teresa, welcome and thank you for being here.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Thank you, Eddie. Well, I couldn't have done it better. Thanks for that introduction.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: I think when you pair human intuition, knowledge and artificial intelligence, you can do amazing things. I'm a big believer that artificial intelligence is here to make us do amazing, beautiful work.
I hope today we can get some of your perspective on how you do it. And Teresa, of course, how is Malt? How is your role? How are things going, happening and changing so far?
[00:01:29] Speaker B: So I think, oh my God, everyone is caught by this AI hype. I'm gonna call it hype, but that doesn't mean I don't believe in it or anything. It's just really, it's like this big train that is just like going through when everyone is trying to get on it and it's, you know, it's exciting. At Malt, I started two years ago and so a lot of things have change since I joined two years ago. When I joined, I was of course looking to automate and make processes more efficient.
We work directly with freelancers for our translation. So that, that hasn't changed, but we have changed a little bit. The way in which we work with content, how we automate processes and the role of the translators itself is changing.
So yeah, I think, but I think I see that as something exciting. It's not, I haven't perceived anything bad about it so far.
And then of course you have the AI trend in the product itself. So we have our new AI search feature.
So, you know, Malt is a marketplace so clients can look for freelancers to help with their projects. And now because of course, AI, you can do that with AI, so they can just say what they're looking for or what project they have and then AI magically tells them, you know, maybe this is, this is the right person for you to help you with your project. So I'm seeing AI everywhere, like directly at my work, but also the features that we translate or localize.
Yeah. Outside with the tools that we collaborate with.
[00:03:06] Speaker A: So really, really, really exciting to hear, to hear that. And of course we love to understand, and this is, this is why we are here. We love to understand. You talk about lean organizations, you talk about lean in house localization teams, and right off the recording we're talking about it. Right.
What is AI doing to help in that process? And I believe as well as humans, we don't want to be wasting resources, we don't want to be doing things just because I feel it's enjoyable. It's like it must have some sort of value, whether it is artistic, business wise or just personal. But we have to think about that and talk about that. Tell us about that linear in house localization process that you have.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: Definitely. I think you said something, you said, how does AI help?
I think that AI, it does help, but it's also a bit the push that maybe we needed to actually see leaner, more strategically placed localization teams. Where before maybe there was a big mix of what the localization team looked like in a company.
Today more and more localization is being positioned in a more strategic position. And I think that's also thanks to AI in that, for example, when I talk about a lean team at malt, I basically, I mean leaner than me, I think it's just me. So, you know, it doesn't get any leaner than that.
So it's me. And then I always say we. So when I talk about the localization I'm like we.
Because Lean doesn't mean that you're alone, that you're an island or that you're, you're, you know, you're a lonely planet out there. You're actually part of this galaxy and you have to collaborate with all the stakeholders. And I always say we because absolutely I am leaning that I am the localization manager. But then that also gives me the possibility to work directly with, with the people that know what they need, where their challenges are and what the roadblocks are. So just to give you an example, and this is pretty like, we didn't plan this, Eddie, you know, like, but this happened today. I talk with the people from the marketing team today because they do a lot of manual steps on their flow. And I am now centralizing localization at MALT as much as I can. So I started with legal, with, with compliance. Product was already part of it. I'm looking into marketing now and they were, I was talking with the people who actually have to do the manual work, you know, the click. And they were telling me, yes, we create the email, we copy paste it into a document, we run it through a trans, like a system where we, I'm not going to say the name but like we run it through a place where we translate it, then we get the translations and then we copy paste them back into our tool and, and then we publish them.
And I was like, oh my God. And I knew this, I knew this is how they were doing it, but then having someone who actually has to go through that pain every day tell me that and you see it on their faces like this is not what, this is not what we envisioned when we, we decided to be marketeers was not copy pasting content into, you know, an LM or a matching translation engine and then copy pasting it back into, you know, somewhere else and then manually pinging the person who has to review it and then manually getting the reply back from them.
So it really is, it's the only way in which you can do it. If, when you have a lean localization team because nowadays with AI you're expected to have a lean team because you're expected to be able to automate and delegate a lot of your tasks on AI and automation, that also gives you the opportunity to be directly in touch with these people who have these real problems that you can really help.
And I see it like, I see, I saw it today specifically with marketing, but you see it also, I don't know, with the compliance team two years ago when I joined or with the legal team.
And I think it's a bit scary for localization industry folks because we've always been used to having big teams with in house translators even or maybe with project dedicated project managers, dedicated people to quality dedicated people for a lot of things. And now it's like one person does it all.
And companies are just making their teams smaller and smaller and you think when am I going to become replaceable by the machine or the automation? And on the one hand I understand that.
On the other hand I think there is still a place for those teams in very big corporations when you need that kind of role. And then there are companies like Malt where there are 700 people working and you have one person doing localization and maybe there it makes sense because it's a smaller team, it's a more agile environment where things can happen quicker.
There you can work with a lean team.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Thank you for making that clarification of lean versus isolated Then for some companies, probably localization team looks a lot like people that also take care of marketing activities and then take care of other content responsibilities.
And then it might look like it's a bigger team, but it's doing different functions. And one of the things that we were also talking off the record was where these approaches that we see right now, on the one hand you have the orchestration element of it and on the other side you have a bit of a one stop, one shop, single flow type of processes. And it will depend on what your goals are and it would depend on so many other elements. And I think that's the beauty of where value will be added from what you've seen and what you are experiencing right now. You've talked a little bit about how localization seems more of a strategic function now.
Before it used to be a nice to have for most. So now it's changing that, it's changing its own nature, becoming more strategic, which probably means it's going to have to get involved or it will get involved in some places in content and decision making.
And perhaps that's also happening because of the better understanding of the technologies, but also how artificial intelligence has made everyone rethink different things that they do.
How do you see that happen in a mold? How do you see it in the industry, this orchestration versus single flow and then all the dependencies that we see around.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: So I think to clarify, well, not clarify, but I would say maybe localization was very cost center oriented before and now it's very, it's more something that brings value to the table.
And I agree that the mentality has changed a lot, but it's not something new in the sense that we used to have the waterfall, you know, like I request my project and then that person checks the project and then they send it into translation and then the translations come back and then, you know, with questions and then we ask the questions and we send them back. And today a lot of translations are happening all the time. It's continuous translation, it's happening right there.
And at Malt we're doing that right. So all our content, as soon as it's available, it's automatically machine translated.
And then the humans are coming in and they are reviewing it and everything that the machine didn't do, well, it's being over written by the human review.
But of course that also means that in the future, so that is just one way of doing it. The continuous localization that we have today is just one day of one way of doing it. And it works for some types of content and maybe I will even say for some language pairs and it might not work for others, but then there are other ways to do it. And I think it's really funny that you talked about the content creation part and how sometimes it's not about translating, but about creating the content from scratch, maybe even with a prompt, you know, not even by a human. But even from an automation point of view, the quality of the content that you get from an LLM when you ask them to translate a piece of content is not the same as if you tell them, this is my brief and this is the type of article that I want in this language or for this market. And the quality changes a lot because you know, and you can see it when you're reading through these articles and you can see the differences. And so of course also in terms of translation, the more you move upstream, the closer you get to the strategy part of things and to the decision making part of things, the closer you get to when the content is being generated and created. And that's where people start to question does it make sense that we are actually creating this content in English and then translating it, or does it make sense that we are actually generating this type of content in different languages from the start?
In terms of the orchestration, I believe we need it for some things. There are some processes that are very complex.
Just as an example for product where you really need to make sure that there are a lot of moving pieces that are coming together and every time. So I, the provider that I use has like an orchestrator tool and it's really complex to use because you need to be, you need to know about engineering in order, in order to use it.
And whenever I can, I'm like, is there something, some connection that I can use out of the box that already exists so that I don't have to go through an orchestrator to do it. And that's always my mentality is like, go for the, you know, the easiest straight path. But then if I can't do it and then I have to do it through orchestrating a flow, then I have to do it. There is no, you know, there's no way around.
Is true that maybe before I would have needed to be an engineer to do that and today I don't anymore because with the help of AI and some like blocks, you can play with things and you can do these things yourself. I do believe that the higher up we move in localization, the closer we move also to developers, to the topic of Internationalization and to the topic of globalization, which is again related directly with the content generation.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: It's very interesting what you mentioned about the intricacies of the different orchestrations that you probably have to build depending on the type of quality that you want. I could already tell if in a flow you are able to say, take this original article and then create a description of it to be transcreated, that's very different than, say, translate.
I can already imagine that, in fact, probably it will get much more intricate over time.
This is my personal intuition. Those that navigate that well, how you orchestrate, how you design, are the ones that are gonna get the best results.
So as these functions are evolving, do you think having these skills gives your company a competitive advantage, gives your localization structure a competitive advantage over those that perhaps say, no, I'm just gonna keep it simple. I'm just gonna use this one stream and I'm not gonna care about intricacies and I don't care markets or culturalization, which is where I will go with my next question. But do you think this gives a competitive advantage to localization teams to think this way?
[00:15:25] Speaker B: I do. I think that's the type of people we are in this industry. I think we've seen localization emerge. I'm not gonna say born because it was there before I started in it, but we've seen it emerge and we've seen it evolved and adapt and change. And the technologies that we have today are unthinkable compared to. I started my degree where you had to like manually align segments in a catchel, you know, like today, if we told someone of 20 years ago what the possibilities are today, their mind will be blown.
So I think it gives the company a competitive edge. But I also think this is like the minimum companies should be expecting from the localization managers that they are able to make use of what's out there that they are not. It doesn't mean that what's up there, it's, you know, it doesn't mean that what you're using today, it's not good. It's just evaluating in every moment what's best for you. And just to give you another example, when we did the legal translations, the team kept coming. The legal team kept coming to me with very small changes. And they were done in Google Docs, you know, and I didn't see the need to automate to centralize. And then they came with a really big document and they were like, can we have this translated in a Google Doc? And that's when I Said, no, wait, because we didn't have the need before and we didn't have the opportunity to improve this before, or the return on the investment was not justified. But with this document, it is, because the savings that we can have on this by using the right process and streamlining that, now they are here, now they exist. So it's not about always improving everything immediately. It's about keeping your mind open and deciding, okay, now this is the right moment to improve this part of the process or to improve the process for this type of content or for this language pair or specifically with AI. So I think it's more that.
[00:17:30] Speaker A: And you know, as you're looking for these improvements and you're making these decisions, we'll probably have to make a decision about the elephant in the room. And it gets uncomfortable when you start talking about, like, translators specifically. In this case, interpretation is probably a different. It's a very different conversation.
But translation right now, a lot of it, we probably all agree that a lot of it will be done through machine translation, A lot of it should be done through machine translation. A lot of it was not done at all and now will be done somewhat, and I think that's an improvement. And then we start thinking about the other side of the pipe, which is globalization, internationalization. And then you think, okay, when does content need to be culturally aware, culturally sensitive? When does it bring us a higher return on investment?
And is there a place there for translators, for linguists, for those that care about culture and the meaning of words behind what words are? Someone is going to have to train the large language model and tell it to. This word in these five countries is different because of that. Yet explaining those sensitivities is going to take us a few decades before so many people have expressed what it feels like for the AI to actually express something like that as well. So, yeah, I guess the question it's out there on what's going to happen with the translators? Is there a place and then it's culturalization really important for the future, that we shouldn't delegate it to AI just yet. I know that's a lot of questions. My apologies.
Take whichever you want and go with it.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: No, I mean, I'm going to go with the one that's closest to my heart and that's translators. Because I think I have a lot of friends who are translators. I was a translator myself at the beginning of my journey and I talk with them and they're, you know, there is anxiety out there, and I understand that. And I work at Mount we work there already with freelancers. So with freelance translators, we don't work through lsps. We work directly with the person. So that. Not to say anything against LSPs, but what I mean is I have a personal relationship with the translators that I work with.
And it is scary out there. But it's just, I think the role, it's evolving. I think they are still needed, very much needed, because.
And I think we've talked about this, but it's just. It's not the same. What a machine can produce and what a human can produce is not the same. What a human produces feels a lot closer than what a machine produces to us. And I think the question was, you know, because for multilingual, I said, you know, imagine if I wrote an article with AI, you would know, you would be reading it and you would be like, this was generated by a machine. And the same way when you generate your content or your translations through AI for your product, for your brand, the people know. The people know a human was not behind it. And then it depends on what type of company you are and what level of closeness you want with your user. Not everyone wants to have the same degree of closeness for mouth. It's important because we work directly with freelancers. Like, we have the rule. Freelancers rule our world. So we want to be up close. And also for the companies, we are there to support them. So we want a really personal approach and something that when they read it, they know we didn't just put a prompt on a machine and then spit something in there because it was easier or cheaper.
So the humans are still involved in the process. And all pieces of content that we translate through in translation are reviewed by a human in the future from a cultural point of view, because it's not only about the culture within the content, it's about how human the content feels. And even if you say, okay, well, in the future, the content feels human because we've managed to replicate that humanity. Okay, what about the culture aspect of it? And then there are levels to it. It's not the same to localize a marketing campaign where things can go very wrong. And a lot of money was invested into it. And just doing it wrong could mean failure.
Or, you know, like you want people to tell you apart as a company, but for the right reasons.
You know, like being differentiating yourself from others, it's not always good. It's only good if you're differentiating yourself for the right reasons. But if you're differentiating yourself because your Amazon and you Machine translated your products in. I think it was Denmark, some Nordic country. And then it was machine translated and there were horrible things there and it made the news.
Is that the kind of publicity that you want to have?
I don't know.
I don't know how that impacted sales. Maybe it was super good for them.
But you know, it's. And I always say the same thing, the way in which you're treated, the quality of the food that you eat, the price of the food that you eat, and the speed at which you get your food at a McDonald's. It's not the same as if you go to a Michelin star restaurant and there are hundreds of in betweens. But when you're a Michelin star restaurant, you buy your ingredients, you cut them by hand, you cook, you know, you have people cooking everything. Nothing is frozen, nothing is made by amaching, nothing is. Everything is fresh, everything is handmade. So that's the same level of comparison. If you want to be the Michelin star restaurant, then you need the human there.
If you want to be McDonald's, which is fine, it's just a different category, then by all means my change translate away and never have a human review it. It doesn't matter. People are not having great expectations about it anyway.
[00:23:44] Speaker A: I think that's probably the big point about it. You did mention something before we get. Because I would really like to dig a little deeper as well.
What's important to translate a malt and what is it that's there? But before that, let's touch a little bit the rest of your team. So you did mention, of course you are there, but you are also looking for this content to feel human. I've heard that the best business strategy is to care. And if you care, you take care of all these things. When you collaborate with your other teams and you're supporting the entire company, what makes that collaboration, that cooperation successful? What are the elements that you see there, there in your communication and in the way you approach it that help you accomplish your goals?
From the localization perspective, I think caring.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: When you really care not only about your final user, but if you treat your colleagues also not as a user, but in a way, yes. So if I am talking with, just to give you an example, now we are centralizing marketing, but a year ago I already brought up this initiative and it didn't work go through.
So for several reasons and I thought about it, I was like, okay, what happened? What went wrong? And then I had to repeat the same with legal and there it went through it went well, and we managed to centralize and, you know, do the project that I wanted to do and automate.
And I thought, what's the difference here? What's. And I think that the difference was I had not taken the time that I should have taken to really, truly understand what was driving the efforts of that team. So I was selling them. Not selling them, but like, highlighting the things that I thought were important. And just to give you an example, maybe quality.
And maybe they were thinking more in terms of money, so savings, maybe.
And although that was part of my conversation or of part of my conversation of my business case, maybe I didn't focus enough on it. And there was a lot of noise around that part that I was trying to get through. And so it didn't go through clean.
And that meant that they thought, oh, that's a lot. Or maybe in their head it was a lot. And then they were like, let's think about it later. I was also going on maternity leave, so I thought, oh, you know what? Yeah, good, when I'm back from maternity leave, we can talk about it again.
In hindsight, every time that I've had a project go through, it was because I took the time to talk with the people, to really understand what their problems were, to really understand what they didn't want to be doing and what they wanted to be doing. And I've had difficult conversations with people who have told me, look, I would like to quit only because of the manual work. You know, because I do so much manual work that it gets to the point where I'm like, what was I hired to copy paste?
And I understand that it's not easy to hear that, but when you have that kind of conversation and then you go back to them with solutions to help them feel better about the work that they do, of course they're going to want to work with you and to want to adopt the measures that you want them to work with.
And so I would say the most important thing is really to understand, to try to understand that we are.
When we are trying to solve people's problems, we shouldn't be focusing on what's going to be the benefit from us from a localization point of view, or what we believe is best from a localization point of view, but really listen to what's important to them. And maybe it's not your priority, maybe it's not what you think it's most important, but it's what's most important to them. And then once that door opens, you can work on the rest, the other things that you think are also important to you, maybe quality, I don't know, like just to give an example.
But yeah, I would say that's important. You really get to know the people.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: That you work with and I love to talk to you about quality. That is one of the big conversations that we also see before we get there. So, yes, you work with the teams and what you're saying makes a lot of sense. If you don't care why this is important to them, you don't have that level of empathy. It's going to be really hard to help anyone in the world.
And of course, their goals are related to the metrics that are around the things that you do and what the company wants to achieve. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Malt? Of course it makes a lot of sense that you have your own freelancers that you get through your own network.
Tell us a little bit about Malt.
What do you do internally and what things are important. Important to be communicated in different languages so that we kind of understand, kind of like where you, where you fit in.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: Yes. So I think, well, we. The type of content that we translate or that we localize at Malt, you have to think that Malt, because it's a sort of like a marketplace, but there is also a lot of compliance involved. And of course, compliance means that depending on the country where you operate the laws, the legislations are different.
So there are different levels of what you localize and why you localize it.
So say the product.
The product itself needs to be as general or generic as possible because it needs to fit with a lot of different realities, of a lot of different markets with a lot of different needs. And that means that there, in terms of the product, there is a big investment on internationalization.
So making sure that we create the illusion of localization on the final user. So there we're talking about variables, we're talking about, you know, really modifying the content for the user in a way that it makes it look like it was done specifically for the user, when in reality it's all generic in the back.
So that's the illusion of the product. Then you have the help center. And the help center, we have some generic parts, but then we have some very specific parts that are related again to the compliance and the regulations in the different countries and their translation is impossible.
Why? Because I cannot translate the legal requirements for opening your own company as a, you know, independent worker in France for a user in, in the uk, it's Just not going to work because it's not the same. So there it's full transcreation, or not even transcreation, full creation from scratch of the content because otherwise it will never resonate.
Then we have the website and on the website we have dedicated domains. So we have multifr, multi S, multi E. And those websites the value proposition changes because maybe just to give an example, maybe the freelancers in Spain when we tell them you get paid in X days and we we have an insurance that you get paid when you complete a job for a client, maybe for them it's important because maybe in Spain there is a problem with freelancers getting paid by companies, but maybe in Germany that is not a problem. Freelancers always get paid. And maybe there we want to highlight the security of working with us through our platform because that's more important for the client user, whether it's the company or whether it's the freelancer, that they are only going to work with people that have been vetted by our teams so that have gone through their checking their documents and that they are real people with real companies or they are real freelancers doing real freelance work.
So a lot of that content is generic and translated. But then some strategic parts of the content, for example, the value proposition is localized and that's another part. And then you have the legal part and for the legal part of course the same applies. You have the data policy and the terms and conditions and like that there are parts of that that change. There are some other parts that are the same independently of the language.
And I think.
Did I like. Is there any specific type of content that you would like me to like talk about and about mouse. But I think that's like the most important part. So like the website through where the prospective freelancers and clients come in and what's important to them so that they know that with us they are safe and that we safe whether it's security of who they work with or safe, whether it's whether they get paid or not, then they go into the product experience needs to be more generic, although for them it looks personalized because it's internationalized. And then the help center where they get the help that they need for the market in which they operate. Actually.
[00:33:10] Speaker A: Thank you for sharing. I think those details are going to be really good for a lot of people that do this. And whether it's done through humans, whether it's done through machine translation independently of that, even if it's just like copied from a government website, because that's exactly what you need to place there. There is the whole conversation on quality in the industry happening, and a lot of people are saying, hey, at some point, this conversation is not gonna. It's not even gonna be a question like, who is now following up with, like, website testing or debugging. A lot of those things now are done through software and technology.
Then, of course, there is that extreme camp, probably true for machine translation. There's going to be plenty of options to just make sure that this very basic type of content gets that level of quality assurance. Now, when we talk about these more complex elements that needs to be translated or even just created from scratch, and how do you think quality is going to evolve? What are you seeing right now in that conversation around quality, especially in your team?
[00:34:18] Speaker B: It's like, I've had a deja vu because I had this conversation this morning.
I did an interview with a girl who's doing her end of master's thesis, and she's interviewing localization professionals. And I talked with her and she asked me at the end, like, I have a question about quality. And I was like, oh, no, quality.
And look, I think I'm gonna give you an example. This is very visual. So I need you to, like, make an effort to, like, try to, like, look at this with me. So I have an exercise that I do when I train people or like, explain people about quality. And what I do is that I show them a painting.
It's a painting by an Italian artist. He's a very good painter.
Amazing.
The painting is. This is like a scene of an old dentist removing a tooth.
So then I asked the question, do you like this painting?
And people normally are like, no, because it's disgusting, you know. And then I'm like, okay, is this painting good?
And the answer is yes, the painting is good because it transmits an emotion. You look at it and you go, the light is amazing. The, you know, the. The proportions are perfect. Perfect how the art is placed with the light. I will send you the painting later so you can see it, but I think if you're following me, you can see it. You can almost feel it.
And that's what happens with quality. A lot of people have opinions on what's good and what isn't, but in reality, it's what they like and what they don't like. And then you have quality. That is, whether it's good or it's not good.
So just. This is just the basis on which I build on my idea of quality. You have three levels of quality. You have the Real quality. So are the proportions good? That's it, it's the light, the shadows, are they correct? And that is what I call the basic level of quality. And that can be do by a machine because if you set the right criteria, it can tell you actually, you know, there is a dot here and it's not there.
You put this terminology in the glossary and they are not respecting it. So you know, that's just, it's obvious, it's. There's nothing subjective about it. Then you have the quality of.
Yes, but is this what you meant? So does this translate when the user sees it, do they feel that there has been translation?
Is translation invisible?
And to me that's intermediate level.
And what we do or what we're starting to do this year is that for tier one features, the product managers and the designers, they can ask for in context review.
So that means that for that specific feature they can ask the translator to go into the product and look at their translations in context and provide feedback.
Tier 1 features, why? Because you cannot justify doing this for a feature that nobody ever visits that is just there because you have to have it there. But you know, how do you justify that effort?
And then you have the quality level of. When you saw that painting, did you feel what the artist wanted you to feel? Did you feel immersed? You know, it's more about.
It's not even about whether it's a good translation, it's about whether it's better than good.
And for that I think at the end it's about the people that sell your product.
How do they perceive the quality of your product?
Do they walk into a meeting room to sell your product to a user when they are going to do a client and they're going to do a demo and are they super comfortable showing your product or are they like, oh God, this sentence, I always have to explain it or there is a typo that's been there for three months and I hope they don't see it.
And they're trying to sell to tell the users we are the right company for you. And behind in their mind they're not convinced that the quality of the content in our product is amazing.
And I think you can feel that sometimes when you are buying something, you can feel it when the person selling it to you is not 100% convinced. So what we want to do at the end of this year is to sit with, for front facing teams. So with the people that actually have to go out there and sell their product and ask them what makes you Uneasy. What makes you uncertain? What makes you feel like, oh my God, please let them not see this or oh my God, no, again, I have to explain that part of the product because it's not clear enough, it's not intuitive enough and fix that for them so that when they go into a sales meeting, when they go to a client and they show our product, they are like, yes, this is like the best product you're ever going to see. And maybe they feel that way, but not about the content. So the content on our product, just put it, you know, the content in our product is amazing. You're not going to see better content anywhere else.
[00:39:39] Speaker A: This is very interesting because I've recently been looking at, you know, websites where, you know, their business is content or consultation. And then one of the things that you realize specifically for English is that this is not regurgitated content. This is well thought of content. This is content that they've spent time working on and probably if they go to another language, they are going to just create instead of transcript. There might be some transcreation, but there will be some effort put in there. And you're saying, hey, this is kind of like a visceral feeling and it ends up being part of where leadership wants to go.
And it's dependent on leadership. And we already talked about this, so we don't have to go in depth about that again. But if leadership is not thinking about being globally aware and then growing and then having these competencies globally, then they won't have them and they won't be able to compete with the companies that do care about these sort of elements.
And of course QE has like you said, this technical element. You can say this is a 10, this is a 9, this is an 8, this is a 7.
And then you can have all these feelings around it, whether it feels right or it feels wrong. And probably you could put also scale there from what you were doing.
How do you measure success? Are there any KPIs, any metrics? Or is also this part of the strategic conversation with the leadership?
[00:41:09] Speaker B: I have a million KPIs, I love measuring things.
So for example, I have KPIs that we've all heard. I don't have any new secret sauce or anything. But just to give you a couple of examples of KPIs that are very important to me, one is number of requests without issues.
It's the number of translation requests that go through the person requesting the translation, ask for the request, we complete the translation, the translation goes back and nothing went Wrong.
That for me is very important. When I started at melt, 45% of requests had issues and now we are around 11% 9%.
So that's really good because all this every time you have to ask, it's time, effort that you spend there. So it's good to not do that.
And you know, that means the process is smooth. Another thing is time to market.
In a way, one of the issues that we had is, okay, when I asked for the translations, how long do the translations take? And Sometimes if the PMs or the developers have a launch date or they have to perform tests and maybe they need the translations in not the final translations. But yes, the translations into perform tests, they don't have them. So by introducing the machine translation immediately, so immediate machine translation on top of human translation, that meant immediate time to market.
So the moment the content is in our system, you have a translation, which means that you could potentially immediately go to market. And that's another KPI. So time to market, which now is basically zero.
Another KPI that is really important to me or like that I feel closely to is efficiency. So the amount of time that developers and product designers or other people spend on requesting a translation, that's also going to go to zero, hopefully in the next weeks. We're working on a process with our provider to do everything automatically. It's almost automatic today. So it's got really.
It's gone really well over the past months. But that's another thing that I want to do.
What other. I have a lot.
Let me see, what else? Well, I also have of course, volumes.
How much volume we process, how much the volume is going up. Quality. So like the what I said, like the basic level of quality, how that is going in terms of score.
Other KPIs are internationalization. So at that 100%. So when I arrived, 0% of the content was dynamic. So I wanted all the content to be dynamic. So introduce variables where we had static components. So that was another one.
Yeah, I can send you a list later if you want. Those are like some of the ones that are like.
[00:44:16] Speaker A: That's great. And probably gives also our audience an impression on what's under the hood and why. It sounds really good because of course you're keeping track of things.
It's not just the feelings around the things. And we're coming to an end of our conversation.
It's been great. I hope we can come back to it and talk more about content and content strategy will probably create some of that content there.
I want to end On a strategic note, what you're doing and, you know, being a lean team, but being highly strategically involved in all the different departments at the organization.
How does it contribute from your perspective to this long term globalization and internationalization strategy at your organization?
[00:45:15] Speaker B: Look, it's.
I will come back in a few months maybe to talk about a project that I'm working on now that I can't talk in detail, but I'm gonna use as an example the idea behind it. So as a localization manager, when you talk with a lot of different people, you have a 360, a little bit of like an outside 360 view of what things are connected together or what things are sort of like weaving through the company and what things are a general pain for the company.
And sometimes we think that's not my job as a localization manager to raise that concern and to say, have you thought about this? It doesn't even need to be a new idea. It could be an idea that has been proposed several times and that you saw and you thought, hey, why didn't anyone follow up on this? Because this was a pretty good idea.
This could have solved a lot of problems. And this is probably the direction in which we should be going.
So it doesn't need to be yours. It might be something that already exists. And that when you see it, you think, huh.
And so I think from a strategic point of view, you as a localization manager have so much on your plate, so many fires to put out, that sometimes we look down to our desk and we go, go, go, go, go with our projects and the things that we want to do and achieve. And sometimes these are these, these projects, these bigger things come across and we're like, ah, yeah, but not now. I have a lot of things to do. Or oh, yeah, but that's huge. And it's not my job and somebody else will do it.
If it's about globalization, if it's about how your company positions themselves at a global scale, even if it's about internationalization and you think we're not there yet, it is your job to bring the attention to that.
And being connected with all these different departments will help you see those opportunities, push for those, for those projects or opportunities that you really believe in and bring value to the company ultimately. So I think when you are very well connected with everyone at a company level, it gives you a vision that nobody else has or very few people in the company have. With the mentality of someone that thinks about global, about how do we make sure that we arrive to as many markets as possible.
And I'm not going to say anything more about it, but maybe I will be back to talk about it in.
[00:47:50] Speaker A: A few months when it's actually, you should be back. And we'll definitely pencil it.
And of course, we have an amazing audience and they're always telling me, hey, make sure that we ask these different questions, that we stay a little longer than just 20 minutes.
So I think we've done a great job this time. Is there anything you'd like to mention to those that are listening right now? Maybe your colleagues, your freelancers, anyone in your company?
Any. Any final thoughts?
[00:48:18] Speaker B: I am. Well, first off, thank you, Eddie, for inviting me. I'm really happy to be here. I really enjoyed it.
Second, I am very proud of the process that I've gone through and mount because I'm very proud of the company I work with because they really care. And I think as a localization manager, you also have. If you really care about that, you should really look for companies where you feel that that is a match. Sometimes I hear localization managers say, oh, but I try and I try and I try and it just doesn't happen. And it's like, well, maybe if you care so much about it, go and find a company that really, truly cares about that human connection between your product and what you do for the people that you cater to.
And the other way around, if you're a company and you have a localization manager and you really, really care about the final experience and your localization manager is not considering that, and they are just like hyper automating everything without considering the human aspect and maybe change the person that is, you know, leading that department in your company.
And just for everyone, every translator out there listening, I don't think that you're replaceable.
I think that we need you, we need the human touch now more than ever. If a company wants to distinguish itself from the automated generic view, they need the human touch. And the companies that really care about it, they will still work with you.
And that's good. Sometimes, you know, that will filter out the companies that maybe that's not so great to work with.
And for all localization managers out there, remember that AI is not there to do your creative work so you can do the dishes and clean, but AI is there to do your dishes and clean your floor so that you can get creative and. And actually do the fun part of your work, and that's it.
[00:50:23] Speaker A: All right, Teresa, thank you so much. For everyone who is listening, this was our conversation with Teresa Toronjo from malt. Remember that here at Localization today, we talk about what is driving innovation in our industry. My name is Eddie Arrieta. I'm the CEO here at Multilingual Media. Teresa, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:50:47] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:50:48] Speaker A: All right, until next time, everyone.
Goodbye.
