[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to the week in review. It seems like my microphone was off.
Your source for the latest news in the language industry. A big shout out to everyone in our social media following this stream, Instagram, LinkedIn, and also YouTube and any other social media where you can find us. I'm your host, Eddie Arrieta. Let's jump right in for those receiving our weekly digest this week, two guest authors discuss strategies that can improve the quality and reach of localized content. Otmo Bratzen explains the benefits of AI powered speech translation, while Slevana Jacobs posits an approach to media localization called Creative Strategy, which ensures linguistically and culturally authentic localized versions. Sign up to our newsletters by visiting multilingual.com. Now onto some news.
Vanillaware released its new tactics rpg unicorn overload, reviving the oldest localization discussion in the RPG community. Jisumi Matsuno, the video game designer of Final Fantasy Tactics, shared his belief that it is, and I quote, unacceptable, acceptable for someone to alter a work without considering the original author's intent. You can read more about this
[email protected]. Also, language researchers just released the latest version of the Ethnologue, which aims to catalog the state of all of the world's languages, all 7164 of them. Many of these languages are are endangered. Listen to NPR's interview with Alaina Talait, language preservationist for the cattle nation. The Cato Nation has two native speakers, both in their nineties. The whole
[email protected] and this race extends to Australia, where Kaurna elder Rod O'Brien wants everyone who lives in Adelaide Plains to be able to understand and speak at least a couple of phrases in the language of the region. The caurna language revival only began in the late 1980s, after decades of being suppressed by colonial forces and practices that ban aboriginal people speaking their own words. Learn more about this
[email protected]. Dot Au now help me welcome our guests for this week with over 20 years of experience in web and content globalization. John is an expert, author, consultant and speaker on web globalization. He co founded Bide Level Research, the first firm dedicated to best practices and insights on how to overcome linguistic and cultural barriers on the Internet. And he's the author of the Weblog Globalization Report Card, which we'll be talking about today, an industry benchmark that evaluates the the global readiness of more than 200 leading websites every year. He's also the author of the book think outside the country. Please welcome John Yonker, president at Bide Level Research. John, welcome to the Weekend Review.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Thank you thank you, Eddie. It's great to be here.
[00:03:32] Speaker A: Thank you so much. And I just want to remind everyone, if you have any questions for John, any questions for us, make sure that you leave them in the comments, either in Instagram, YouTube or LinkedIn. We'll be able to see those comments and we'll share them live here in this conversation. And John, thank you so much once again for joining. I have a few questions about the report, and my first one might seem a bit too superficial, but you've been doing this for a while now. So the web globalization report card, and I don't know how many people have asked this, but where did the idea come from? What were you thinking about when you thought about doing this?
[00:04:11] Speaker B: Well, Eddie, you know, I was a five year old boy when I began this report.
No, I wish. No, I was. Well, my background was in web development and marketing, and it was early days of the Internet, and I began localizing websites 20 plus years ago and realized at the time there was no, I didn't know what was a best practice at the time. And so I was. And so I co founded Bite level Research in 2000 and was doing some consulting. And I wanted to be able to say hey, to these clients, this is a best practice. This is a less lesser best practice. Here is the average number of languages supported by the leading global brands. Nothing existed, quite honestly. And so I said, well, let me, let me just put together a report.
And I created four criteria for, and the report card was designed to be pretty simple. You know, you get a score from zero to 100 based on four criteria, which included internationalization, localization, global reach, which is languages, and then global navigation or the global gateway.
And those four categories are here today as well, with the most recent one, although the criteria have gotten much more difficult. You have to support 50 languages to score tops in global reach now. So it wasn't 50 languages when it began.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: This is a conversation that we had in the past week with someone in the industry. And we were talking about not necessarily a scorecard, but something similar to what you have. We're talking about testing different software in the localization industry. One of the things that we realize is that there are many types of tests that you can run to evaluate things, and you can pick and choose which test you want to run your application to. And there might be some tests that you can run your website that will tell you you are amazing at globalization and you're amazing at localization. Can you tell us a little bit about the essence of the criteria that you're using. Are you taking on any academic background theories to think about the variables that are in there? Where does the rationale for that criteria come from?
[00:06:45] Speaker B: That's a great question.
It is subjective in a lot of ways. No question. And what I try to do is balance what I know works based on personal experience, based on interviews with and consulting with many of the companies in the web. In this report card, I talk to a lot of teams who manage these global websites. And over the years I've learned what works, what's not working, and then that gets refactored back into the methodology of the report card. So I would say there is a fair amount of quantitative, there is quantitative data, but there's also a fair amount of qualitative analysis. So it is somewhat opinionated, I'll be honest.
This report card is both reflective, but it's also opinionated in the sense of I want to push companies to do better constantly.
You mentioned ethnologue, which documents over 7000 languages on the planet. And yet according to the report card, the leading global brands support an average of 34 languages. And that to me is just really, really sad. It's really not good. There's a massive language gap. Still, companies are very frugal, to put it mildly, when it comes to investing in localization.
They're lazy. They will do as little as they have to do to make money, and we know that. And it's very, the folks that I talk to within these organizations, they're always pushing for more budget to support more people.
And so the report card does have that point of view that there's so much more we could and should be doing. Because I've said for many years is that, yes, the Internet connects computers, but it's language that connects people.
And so that belief underscores a lot of what the report card is about.
[00:08:45] Speaker A: And thank you for that. Targa. Sometimes I get this feeling that we all wish there was a lingua franca and that we could do everything in English and then we didn't need to do anything else. And in that ethnologue, it was very interesting. The United States alone has 197 languages and 193 are in danger.
It's crazy. And just the United States, 997. That's. I never thought we had that many languages around the world. So it's very interesting what you're mentioning. And you also mentioned that you want companies to look at the report and then find better ways to do things. In your experience from previous report cards, what is some of the feedback that you've heard from previous years directly from companies and teams, letting you know, what are some of the key things that perhaps numbers cannot tell you about that have made a difference for them?
[00:09:46] Speaker B: Well, I will say that one thing that, that has stood the test of time, and it is a best practice, is trying to balance global consistency with local flexibility in your. In your architecture and your design.
And that is, I have documentation now, which is the benefit of having done this for a long time, is when I first did the report card, Google was only a few years old, but they had built Google for scalability, which meant consistency, global consistency in their architecture. And there were only a handful of global companies that were doing something similar, Philips, for example, out of the Netherlands. So they had a globally consistent design and it was interesting. And another company at the time, Toyota, which supported, I think, over 20 languages, lot of markets, and this is 20 years ago, did not very inconsistent. Every country had their own design, look and feel templates, what have you. 20 years later, I went back to Phillips and I go back to Toyota, and Phillips is still globally consistent and Toyota is still struggling with this.
And it's really hard for global companies that are very decentralized to have this consistent look and feel globally. So the sooner you can do that, the more it'll benefit you financially.
From a branding perspective, from an efficiency perspective, it will save you so much time and it's a lot more companies have finally crossed over and it's now baked into their DNA. But it's.
It is something that I've learned that once, and it sometimes takes very high level support or mandates, but once you do that, it really frees you up to focus on what matters to your users, which is localized content, localized functionality, if you're spending all your time reinventing the wheels and redesigning at a very high level, eats up so much resources, so many more resources that could have been devoted to what matters to your.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: Customers, would you say? And I'm going to pick your brain on these, because my experience, and I like to do this often, which is to go on Google and then find a japanese company and then just go on the website, not in English, but in Japanese, and then just check how things are kind of like structured and organized, and then try to do this with companies in the Middle east whose primary language might be Arabic, and then you try to do this with chinese companies and then you'll see kind of like the different ways in which things are framed. It's very interesting. And then you look at, you know, english speaking companies versus, like, latin american companies. So my question, given your experience, is how much of, how much of a lot of these variants in look and feel in some places is just not really adapting to best practices globally? Right. How much of it is kind of like a technical disparity and how much of it, from your perspective is cultural, is we just, we just do things from right to left. We just put irrelevant information first and then later we like more text, we like more imagery, like how much of it's technical, how much of it's cultural. To try to understand that gap there.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: Another great question that I will not be able to answer quickly.
It's both technical and cultural. Technical. Let's talk technical. Most of the world is mobile. First, they leapfrog desktop computers entirely. A lot of users around the world, they never used a desktop computer. So if you're designing for the world, you would be wise to think mobile before desktop, or at least think of them in parallel, or develop for them in parallel. That is one of the most important takeaways when you think about the, the rest of the world.
There is global consistency holds in terms of template. For the most part, there can be exceptions to the rule. And I've looked at a lot of usability studies, participated in a few. You do see some exceptions in, say, Korea, China, Japan, which could warrant having a slightly different template for those markets, although you can still leverage a consistent framework or design system above that. But yes, you do have to be very sensitive for how your customers are consuming content and down to the level of how you write and how you get to the point.
Western writing, american writing is very much in your face, can be viewed sometimes as a very aggressive, overly aggressive, a lot of eyes and use in other markets, that doesn't fly as well. So sometimes you have to localize to that degree where you're literally rewriting the source content and focusing more on a global.
The companies that really do it well, they have a superset of content that is as globally agnostic as possible, that can then be localized. But it's hard to get to that level. And some markets are going to demand a lot more attention and also a lot more of locally generated content, and I'm a big proponent of that as well.
[00:15:25] Speaker A: Excellent. So I'm going to get into the report and your globalization report card. Can you tell us a little bit about it? How did it go this time? You've done it for a while now. How much easier was it than the first one you did? Or how much harder is it now that expectations are set?
[00:15:48] Speaker B: It never gets easier because I visit every, I don't outsource it. I visit every one of these websites. Some of them I know very, very well.
It has highs and lows. I get really excited when I see a company make changes for the better in terms of global consistency. Adding languages. Spotify, for example, added 16 languages over the past year. Coca Cola has even added languages that I always get excited about that I always get a little sad when I see languages dropped. It is rare. It generally doesn't happen. Of course, it's happened a lot for Russia.
So that always hurts a little bit. And also what hurts is when a company undertakes a global redesign and demotes the global gateway from the footer to the header or from the header to the footer. That always breaks my heart a little bit. But in general, I will say what I said in this report card is that web globalization has bounced back from a linguistic perspective. Because what I saw two years ago was, for the first time ever, was on a global level, just focusing on these large global brands. The net number of new languages dropped, and that was the first time that had happened. So it was a hangover of obviously COVID economic, you know, economic headwinds, et cetera. There were a lot of reasons why a lot of companies reset, if you will, and there's still a little bit of that going on right now, but there's a lot of growth as well, and that's that always, I think we're, and now with AI and the potential there, I think we're going to, we're on the verge of seeing another spike in terms of companies really dramatically expanding their global reach.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: That's very interesting, and it perfectly aligns with my next question, which is, if you can share one or a few insights that surprised you from this exercise, what would that be? So, as someone will go into the report, I'm sure everyone finds something insightful that applies directly to them. But for you, what were some of the specific insights that you'd said? Okay, this surprised me, and you just mentioned globalization is resurging, which is really reassuring for, for folks in the industry.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: I'm surprised that more companies are not taking a close look at what Airbnb is doing with automated, what I call customer facing, automated translations, and are not doing more quickly in that regard.
I've talked to a lot of companies. They're all looking closely at it and there are various stages of deploying it. But I was, I guess I was partly hoping and partly expecting to have seen a few more companies take it to the next level over the past twelve months and they haven't yet. I know it's in the works in some cases. There's a lot of concerns around it to be invalid concerns as well when you allow your customers to opt into machine translated text on your website.
But it can be managed, you can manage expectations successfully. And I think Airbnb is a good role model in that regard. Card so little disappointed because I think the potential is going to be significant for companies to do that. And I'm not saying professional translators are all going to lose their jobs. I'm not suggesting that at all. But what I'm saying is machine translation, automatic translation can unlock vast amount of content that would never have been professionally translated to begin with. And we are just in the early days of it. And it excites me because what it does is it helps further build the business case, which people in this industry need to always cite the business case for supporting users in their local language. And it opens so much opportunities, financial opportunities, obviously, but customer support opportunities, you name it, it is significant.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: And that is fantastic news for those that are trying to look exactly at what are the role models in globalization, web globalization in particular. I also had one question that I was curious about. Do you have any unexpected heroines or heroes in the report that you said, I did not expect this from this company or I've never heard of this company before. Are there any of those names that you can share?
[00:20:34] Speaker B: You know, I was happy to see John Deere move up in the rank. John Deere added five languages last year. Here's this old school american brand.
In full disclosure, I consulted with John Deere many years ago, many years ago. And it's always neat to see tech companies.
Netflix. Yes, you expect them to do a good job of global consistency and scalability and support. 60 plus languages. But whenever I see one of these older brands that are not tech improve their website, I'm always pleasantly surprised. So I was surprised there.
I'm always a little disappointed in Apple, I have to admit. I've said that they punch below their weight in terms of language investment. They did add Vietnamese, fully added Vietnam support for Vietnamese over the past year, but they could do so much more. And I would love to see that.
[00:21:34] Speaker A: I love to see that as well. And thank you so much for indulging me with all these questions. Just in full transparency, we did not send any questions to John. This is full, full 100% organic content from John Yanker from bide level research. And we are talking about the web globalization report card.
Where can we get the card and the reporting. Who do you think will benefit from getting it?
[00:22:04] Speaker B: Well, it's not an inexpensive report. You can go to byelevel.com to purchase it and download it. But any company that considers itself global or has global aspirations would benefit. And obviously, the sooner you, you adapt, adopt these best practices, the better, you know, because a lot of companies, unfortunately, learn the hard way about global consistency, about the global gateway, about what I call a local facade where they just over promise and under, under deliver. That's a major mistake that a lot of companies that are new to going global encounters. So obviously the companies in the report card would benefit from it to see where they rank and see how to get better. But I'm just really scratching the surface. This is not a, it's 150 global, you know, brands. And so anyone that's, anyone in, anyone in the Fortune 1000, I would think would find it quite useful.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Excellent. Thank you so much. If anyone has any questions on LinkedIn, Instagram or YouTube, this is the time to make those questions. John, is there anything else you like to share with the audience? For those that have maybe acquired the reports previous years and then are kind of like on the fence, anything else you'd like to share?
[00:23:32] Speaker B: Just that I now say the report card is 20 years young because it sounds like a long time, but we're really just getting started. And I say localization is a never ending journey, and it really is in a lot of respects. Even the companies that are in this top 25 are just starting out, and I'm really excited about the next 20.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: Fantastic. John, thank you so much for your time. We hope to have you with us again in the future.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: Thank you, Eddie.
[00:24:07] Speaker A: All right. And that's Jan Yonker once again, from byte level research talking about the web globalization report card to our wonderful audience. Thank you for your participation. Inactive a little bit today. That's okay as well. Remember that you can catch up on more interviews, news and press releases by visiting multilingual.com. This has been the weekend review. Remember to leave your comments and questions in our comments, and subscribe to our channels for more language industry updates. Until next time, goodbye.
