Panel discussion: "The importance of community in the translation and localization industry"

Max Morkovkin 00:06
We are getting prepared for the first panel discussion that we will be having today. And we have interesting speakers, people who are involved into communities, building communities and dedicate themselves to moderating these communities. So we're all humans, we like to communicate with each other, and community is can can lead us to great success if it's managed properly. Right, so we can achieve very good results, and our speakers of the panel discussion will share the best practices and their success stories. Okay, the moderator of our panel discussion, Huawei is here. Hello,

Vova Zakharov 00:59
everyone. We're just in time to say hello to my son. Oh, great. Great to meet you, Max. I always love your background images. I mean, I love most

Max Morkovkin 01:12
most most of the cases is breakwall.

Vova Zakharov 01:15
Some kind of a terminator afterwards. There are what what is that? Oh,

Max Morkovkin 01:20
these one I bought in Hong Kong. I've been to Hong Kong several times. And these are skyscrapers from Hong Kong.

Vova Zakharov 01:27
Oh, I saw it was some I have a Robert or something.

Max Morkovkin 01:31
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. Topical.

Vova Zakharov 01:35
Yet anyway. Okay, good.

Max Morkovkin 01:37
So I think it's time to introduce everybody. Let me introduce you. To those who don't know you. You are very famous, emerging from SmartCAT. And always live in community. So we're editor in chief at SmartCAT and connect the translation community lead. And we have amazing panelists today with us. So we're giving mic to you.

Vova Zakharov 02:00
Let me introduce everybody, everyone. Yeah, thanks, Max. You told almost everything we need to know about community in your leading but we will try to somehow fill up the remaining 40 minutes. So. Okay. We have just for two minutes. We have so many ground to cover. I will just briefly introduce our panelists today. We have with us loi father from our last company that uses community management to a very high degree. We have earring Ribnica from women in localization and also from a rotate down positive technologies. Right. I loi Hi, Irina, we have young Hendricks I think everyone knows who Yan is. So no need to introduce but we are well Yang is the CEO of beluga and also the founder of block lunch, the biggest meetup ever in all industries. And we have Simon akrami, who is the founder and that main guy behind the super successful group on Facebook, that is called successful freelance translators. So as I said, we have a lot of ground to cover. So communities communities is such a big thing, right? Everyone kind of understand this. But I kind of understand it because I Managed Markets community, but I wanted to start our talk with the goals of having a community because it's not always that clear. And I want to start with Simon because he manages a freelancer community and freelancers are like them, leaving blood inside the industry. So I think it makes sense to talk about these first. So Simon, maybe you can tell us what made you start this group, what goals you had, how it evolved and how it is doing right now.

Simon Akhrameev 03:45
Hello, everyone. Hello, Wawa. Thank you for inviting me to join this great discussion, I hope you will find some interesting information from it. So I started this group back in 2016, if I'm not mistaken, and I was going to create a, a close community of freelance translators, where we can share our experience regarding the business practices, marketing, blogging, and so on a promotion of translation services on the web. So this was the original purpose of this group. But gradually, it gradually shifted to another focus. And now we are we are mainly a group kind of support group, where we ask different kinds of questions where we conduct polls to know the opinion of our audience. And also we share information about events, webinars, and similar kinds of things. So the overall the overall goal of this group is kind of is to create a closed type community where we can discuss industry issues like rates, communication with clients, maybe some technical setup for translators, some technical issues, overcoming these difficulties with technical, technical things like cad tools, setting up and dictionaries, extracting terms, working with different file formats and so on. And also, we wanted to render any other type of assistance needed and asked by freelance fellow freelance translators. So the group size right now or is 110 1002. Members, we recently hit this kind of ceiling, achieving this grid step. And weekly, weekly or monthly audience monthly active audience of this group is around 5000. Members. So and on the average, we have around three to four posts a day, of course, the activity depends on the time of the weekend, be time of the day, but in general, it's about three posts per day. So it's not too annoying if you if you use Facebook frequently.

Vova Zakharov 06:05
That's the point. Yeah. Make sure everyone to join the successful freelance translator, translator or translators, what's the correct Oh, translators? Translators group on Facebook, if you use Facebook? And by the way, we have this commands in the chat. That is one of the best groups. Thank you, Simon, for this introduction. Yeah, make sure to check out the Group By the way, there's already like 500 people who are watching us. So make sure to share this event because remember, the tagline is stronger by sharing question. We have lots of friends who will be grateful for your sharing this amazing opportunity to learn from the best minds in the industry, like myself and all the other guys in this room. So this being said, I was browsing the chat. And I think like 90% of commands go to young here like celebrating your greatness. I guess. So yeah. You found it lock lunch? You used to be the CEO of beluga before that. I think so although I'm not sure maybe you can tell us what brought you to this idea and how it all turned out.

Jan Hinrichs 07:10
Yeah, so thanks a lot, first of all, to Vova to you to SmartCAT to max for for organizing a lot from home again, this is just an awesome opportunity to get insights. Agilent really enjoyed it. So this is this is community like I understand it. So it's bringing together like minded people and grow together in all aspects. And this was the motivation for for lunch as well, when we started in 2019, early 2019 was getting together getting to know people from the same industry in a location physical location seems so way so far in the in the past. But 2019 We met offline and we had a great lunch together, we discussed problems of of our day to day life, on a peer to peer basis. And this peer to peer basis was so much so inspiring and so good. This experience to be able to, to learn from from each other not on a broadcast, but on a peer to peer basis. That it when then viral last year. So in 2019 2020, it grew to about 600 events, I think we are now and it's just an awesome global community, which we really hope to, to grow even further to get to every every part of the world.

Vova Zakharov 08:54
Yeah, great. I have quite a few questions, but I think we will leave them for discussion. Thanks for this introduction. I do think that lunch is one of the most amazing things that happened to our industry. So, next I want to talk to Irina, who is rel? Who leads the EME Ay ay ay media. I'm not sure how, what is the correct way to pronounce this? I think it's Europe, Middle East, India and Africa. Division in women in localization. So you're in a your community if we can call women and localization that communities pretty like purposeful rights. It's built around purpose of advancing women's rights in the industry. So maybe you can talk about this, how it works and where it brought

Irina Rybnikova 09:40
you. Uh, hello, everyone, and thank you for the discussion because I believe that communities are the key point in our industry right now. And I represent the women in localization. This community was founded in 2008. It has 28 chapters. In 20 countries, so it's pretty huge. And our mission is to foster global community to advancement of women and the localization industry. So we help women to grow within their career. We help them to train to learn about new technologies to get dated, access to exclusive webinars, discounts, Early Bird registrations, job boards. And we have social media, like Global website, blogs, and you can post there too. We have mentorship program, we have leadership, skill development, so everything that you need to grow, to know something new, to grow, and to make visible. Sometimes we need it in our industry. So the key, the key role in this community, our volunteers, so they do everything, and I really appreciate it. And it's really supportive. We all speak on the same level, it doesn't matter who you are your freelancer, your company owner, you're from LSP side, or I don't know, client side, just an expert from any any sphere, not on not only localization, because leadership is not like, localization skill only. But I believe that networking is the most important part of everything. So we have friends, we have colleagues from all over the world. And yeah, like small add, go to our Global website, click the become a member button. You'll get everything. Men are welcome. Women are welcome. Everyone can become members.

Vova Zakharov 11:48
And everyone else as well. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, by the way, join our all communities join reading and localization. I'm not sure it's a click away. But you can try. Join lock lunch. Yeah. Is there a page to join lock lunch, right? Or do we just follow you on social networks? You're muted. So you can unmute unmute.

Jan Hinrichs 12:11
Sorry, we have a page. It's not super sexy. But we are working on. Yeah,

Vova Zakharov 12:21
you're muted again. Your computer keeps using you randomly. So yeah, I already said where we can find Simon's Simon's group. And you can also join, just in case you wish smarkets community at smartcare.com/community. there's already plenty of interesting discussions going on. So make sure to check it out. And now we have our last but not least, panelist, loi Fowler. And I know your case is pretty peculiar, because all Carlos manages the community notes of translators, but of people outside the industry, which is pretty interesting to hear about. So tell us about.

Loie Favre 12:57
Yes. Hi, everybody. Thanks, again, for the inviting us to the panel, it's really a great honor to be part of the second lock from home in my case. So I'm super happy about that. Right. So I work for Alchemist. And what we're really interested in is helping is intersecting different communities together. And sort of bringing, you know, all the insights that the localization community has to other communities who actually could really benefit from what localization and translation industry people really know a lot about. And unfortunately, other industries aren't necessarily that aware of how localization works. And like there's a lot of work that still needs to be done in connecting different industries. And want to organize it as as it works a lot with it and gaming communities, that is current that already exists, though, in parallel with their own community, and finding ways of collaborating on projects to help them bring their passion projects to fruition. And some of their projects aren't necessarily funded, or they don't have the know how the translation know how they don't have glossaries and that sort of thing. So are the even the tools to really make their projects happen. So what we're interested in is how we can work with those communities and make some great work together, whether it be gaming or it and following those trends that they're working on and bringing that into localization. So whether it be GitHub or or Stack Overflow, like there's a lot of ways that localization get involved in those communities.

Vova Zakharov 14:30
Cool, cool. Yeah, thanks a lot, Lloyd for this brief introduction. I hope we will get back to it at a later point. I want us to switch to q&a. So right now because we have quite a lot of maybe not lots of questions, but I think they're interesting can we can like ditch the part where we can discuss prepare topics and discuss the questions instead. So there was this question I liked very much from Mariana from Mariana I Once I want like attempt pronouncing the whole, the whole name so Mariana from smartcard community asks, there are so many communities nowadays that is hard to keep track of everything that's going on groups on LinkedIn market community, thank you, groups of professionals and Facebook pros confirm and green groups and so on. Do you see this as a good thing? Because it gives people more options? Or is it bad that we are all scattered? So anyone wants to? To go for it to answer?

Irina Rybnikova 15:36
I think it's a good because we you can try any community you like, you can visit events, you can try what do you feel? Some of us are members of different communities, and it's not a problem. So just try, decide what you want and go further. I think choice is the best way to try.

Jan Hinrichs 16:02
I'm totally totally with Irina, in this sense. I'm I'm part of a woman in localization. I'm lot lunch at lunch, of course, I'm gala member, each association or group or community has a unique purpose. And a very different, different approach of communication. Of course, we have certain topics that are overlapping. But in general, you know what Irina said make make up your mind. And so you try to actually articulate your question, and then go out and have find the answers in the communities because they are there and they are more reachable, reachable. And ever before.

Vova Zakharov 16:52
I think it's also a fun thing that different communities have different levels of support, and like the overall atmosphere, so sometimes you want to feel good, and you go to LinkedIn, you post something, everyone congratulate you. You feel good. But sometimes you want like harsh criticism, you go to Reddit, for example, there are also some communities out there, and people like to tell you exactly what they think about it, which which might not be always pleasant. But I think it's a good thing to have this spectrum of things.

Irina Rybnikova 17:19
I think it's interesting that last year, we all moved online. So you can try whatever you want. In any region. In any country, you can do cross country Cross chapter communication edits, like like Flash, it was like a boom last year. So that's really cool. I think

Loie Favre 17:39
it also gives everybody an opportunity to become better digital marketers for themselves. You know, like when you're, you have so many different access to different tools now to spread the word about your business, maybe more than you had before. And you can basically choose what format works better for you, maybe you're not so into Instagram, or maybe you really love Instagram, you want to post a lot of beautiful pictures. Maybe you're more into reading long LinkedIn texts about yourself, or about what you're what you've been up to. So I think there's so many different formats you can choose from. You don't have to do everything. I think it can be overwhelming if you like I need to be present on everything. And just choose the specific ones, like as Dan said, that really work for you. And concentrate on those don't get overwhelmed.

Vova Zakharov 18:22
Yeah, I think it's really makes sense to focus. Focus, because otherwise you'll be doing too many things at once. And it never works. Well. Yes, like in translation.

Simon Akhrameev 18:31
There is not too much to add to this topic. But I would like to add something anything. Anyway. It's almost inevitable in our day. So to have multiple options. And it's really good to have a lot of diverse groups where you can find literally anything which belongs to your sphere of interests, and choose wisely, what got what kind of groups are basically provide you with the right information. So that's good to have a lot of them and choose, or maybe even learn to choose what you actually need.

Vova Zakharov 19:04
Yeah, that's also a skill. Okay, so we have Mariana who hope this answered at least partially a question. We have a question from Harvey Diaz, who also runs a community that's called Lock life, make sure to check it out. I think he was pretty active in sharing it on social networks or so you might have heard about it, but check again. And he asks how can localization communities like women in localization or others contribute to make sure that everyone always has equal access to leadership and other roles? So there I said

Jan Hinrichs 19:46
so this is this is Irina, actually poor woman.

Irina Rybnikova 19:50
Yes, but I want to like understand the correct like question, that is a tough question. So

Vova Zakharov 19:58
as always, friends agree.

Irina Rybnikova 20:01
No i. So I think that from our community, and I think I believe that from other communities too, we are, like, empower each other. And we are trying to do our best to provide equal support and equal quality information to everyone, to every member, and even your, if you're not a member, you can join events and try it. So I see that all the volunteers, and all the communities are doing their best to help each other. So there is no bosses and others, there's only equal level communication. And you can try you can test. Do you like to work with this people do like their companies? Do you like the sphere, you can try new roles sometimes. For example, you never tried social media, but you can do social media as a volunteer and try maybe it's your future. So you can test. You can like estimate, and you can think about your future plans. So that's opportunity. And I think it's equal from volunteers. And I think maybe coming back to the questions, yes, we are trying to support women in our community. And I think it's important. So if you want to discuss, like, more details, numbers, and everything, I think we can do it like somewhere else, but just want to share time with others. So I have like, a lot of things to talk about, but maybe later. Yeah,

Vova Zakharov 21:33
I would say that this is a question he is preparing for his women leadership panel coming up in on March 3. So he makes

Jan Hinrichs 21:44
one, one point I would like to that so we as community leaders here on this panel, and heavy on your panel, of course. It's about us to create this discussion about equality, you know, and I'm a father of two girls nine years old. So of course, I'm a little bit on my own future, their own future. So, you know, we need to talk about that we need to vote be vocal about equality. And I think communities have this huge broadcasting past possibilities. So now it's it's out in the wild for discussion. And the more we, especially those who are like very visible in the social networks, and so on, the more we talk about that, the more we try to give our our bit to make it happen. I think we make it happen. Might take time, but we all are adding our bit to to these courses. And at the end, it's also for our own sake, because we need to build the Society of tomorrow. So it doesn't work if there's inequality.

Irina Rybnikova 23:09
Yes, and I think I believe that inequality in every level, not only in middle management, but top management too. So our organization industry has 70% of women. So that's huge. And my my my goal is to help anyone to grow and have equal abilities. Yes.

Vova Zakharov 23:32
Super super. We have a question about the COVID pandemic from Yulia Bouwmeester. She asks what changed in the community landscape during after the COVID-19? How mostly offline community events such as loc lunch, adapting to the changes in Will we ever see a fight against again? So I think young is the best poised to answer.

Jan Hinrichs 23:55
That was, of course, a huge, huge, huge shift from offline to online, from 2019 where we really felt this community is growing everywhere. We saw these great pictures of people from our industry. We've never met in the same city. Having having lunch together, Irina and Moscow 20, almost 30 people getting together there that was amazing, and then suddenly locked lunch, last the lunch in the name because suddenly it was no way to go lunching with with other people in the in the in the industry or at a hole. So in early March, I advised also the community you know to stop going out for lunch very early, because you know, there's no means and risking health over Some business or you know, just just that, that was a tough call. So because we know that we had a very good position at that time to grow, and it was a great community and so on. But after a few weeks, it was clear, you know, this, nobody knows how long this will go. And we're still in the middle of it and don't see really an end in front of us. So I think there was a very interesting point where, where we tried as a community of ambassadors to motivate people to say, Okay, this feels really strange. This online being on a lot launch, virtual, no launching, shall we launch simply not launch at the same time eating in front of the camera. But just try it get get a feeling out of it. And within six weeks, I think we have seen the first online versions of launch. And from there on, we had last year 2020, almost half of all the 350 lock lunches that took place, where were virtual ones. And we have seen communities, a community dynamic within these virtual communities, which were unprecedented. In in our industry before, because you know, Marina, for example, in Santiago, built up a huge followship we have all over the world. Also small cities that have never would have never probably be a place for a lot lunch, the physical lock lunch because of size, and so on, are suddenly on the on the map on the map, and which a great follows followship people coming from all parts of the world just to go to Leipzig or dress and lock lunch, because it's just great. And the colors are great, and the community there is great. So suddenly, there was a huge shift the way we communicated in a lot launch changed a lot. Suddenly, it's more listening to what the group the whole group is doing. There's a new experience. And I'm very proud and happy that so many people, ambassadors lock launchers embraced virtual, and I'm sure this will be the future, a virtual hybrid offline model in the future as well. Perhaps

Irina Rybnikova 27:45
I can add that at the beginning of last year, we were all were shocked what's going on what will be next. A lot of like, experts were afraid of online tools and everything. But start in the second half of the year, I saw that. For example, within our communities, all the chapters started to communicate more and more. People from small towns from other regions that are not covered under the who wasn't able to read the real offline events, they started to join, they started to communicate, they started to do joint events from different regions. So this is some some kind of huge grow, and huge opportunity. And I really believe that it will keep growing. So coming back to normal life, we will still keep offline and online events. And I believe that tools will help us to do it. Because for example, in Moscow, I have a request to do offline lock lunch with online translation. So three minutes, so I don't know how to do it. But I'm thinking about it. So So I think the same for other communities. So we want we we are hungry for information right now. We want to get as much as we can, no matter where we are, can we just go to the place or we just want to listen to streaming. So Yeah,

Vova Zakharov 29:15
makes sense. We had some more questions, but I actually want to touch on some topic that was on my mind. So I will hijack the time. And it is about the the fact that we usually only communicate with a within our own industry communities. And sometimes it can be like an echo chamber when we praise each other but the outside world like knows nothing about what's going on. And they have all kinds of assumptions about localization and translation, like Laurie said in her introductory like leading so maybe low and maybe you can talk a bit more about how exactly alconox works with these outside communities and how it helps, maybe some tips and so on.

Loie Favre 29:59
Sure Yeah, no problem. So yeah, in the scope of what we're doing, as I mentioned before, localization is not really well known to many other communities. But there are super a lot of there's a lot of passionate communities outside of ours, even maybe more passionate, I don't know, our localization, interest is very passionate, but like it game and all that they're all very passionate as well. But they really did, there's a little bit of a gap in terms of knowledge and the know how in order to how to make some of these projects come to life. For example, on GitHub, you know, there's a lot of different projects that are ongoing, where technical writers and translators are writing, documenting the code, and finding ways how we can adapt to creating what translations and documentation and code as well, in order to better work with developers and IT communities who are working in those those ecosystems. But the problem there is that, you know, a lot of the time the processes are a bit slow, or the style or the, you know, the quality is what's lacking a little bit. So how vendors and language service providers or communities can help those other those developers and of communities, community developers, is to provide them with like, style guides, and how they can, you know, write more consistent work glossaries. And also, the role of the LSPs is mainly to check for that do do that final proofreading of their work to make sure that they're not, you know, that there's no errors and whatnot. And also some sort of a moderation you know, there are some instances that Google notified us when there was some like, sort of, you know, not so nice to wording and not so nice, like insulting topics, and that sort of thing in some of those published content. And LSPs can help communities moderate the content that they're putting out there, you know, by working together. And when you work with it, community really needs to, you know, be aware that I think it's any community, whether it's localization, or developers or gaming and communities that you need to know that these people are not working for money, they're working for their passion. And so you need to really take into that into consideration, and help them as much as possible, you need to provide them with guides, you need to also think about their suggestions. You know, I think in the like, in women, I love women and localization and the other ones, like, there's a lot of suggestions coming from the members. And so LSPs need to also think like, really take those to heart, even in other communities that they're working with, who are actually the experts in their niche, and really take that to heart when they're working together. And also find ways to compensate the community. I think that in many cases, we forget, okay, like they're working for free, we can overload them with work, but what can we give to them, if not, you know, actual, you know, a salary or something like that. So like maybe access to, you know, better testing, or something that they're really passionate about, or free access to a game or maybe some other seminars and conferences. But I think it's really important to find ways of how we can give back to the community that are helping us so much, and projects, and making like in any community that we're working with, so I don't know, maybe you guys can share, like what you guys give back to the community, maybe a woman I localization, how you give back to them for making like such a big effort in, in helping towards your main goal.

Irina Rybnikova 33:38
Thank you, Laura, for such an interesting point. But I really like your idea of getting information and requests from members. So as I see, I want to post a post on this, this point, because, as I see, there's a huge amount of technology requests. We want to know what's next, what's going on how Machine Translation Translation, works, customer, MT and voice, voice translation, everything. But at the other hand, there are a lot of requests about soft skills, how to communicate, how to position myself, how to communicate with others, like marketing sales. You're like a head of department, I don't know, developers. So because we are not like separate industry, we are integrated in the whole company spheres. So and this is we have a lot of discussions about it. And sometimes as a community, we just need some fun. So we have events just to have fun to see each other and discuss something so yes, of course it only can be live when you react on your real members requests. And it's not about technology. Only my there are a lot of other topics to discuss. Yeah. So thank you, thank you for this time.

Vova Zakharov 34:57
Simon, what do you think? I mean, most of members of your group. They are they're also like volunteering. So

Simon Akhrameev 35:06
when they think about what exactly

Vova Zakharov 35:09
giving back to the communities like people participate, they're not for the money. And like, I mean, you're not or you're also not there for the money, but perhaps it gets some I don't know, coverage, exposure, and so on. So

Simon Akhrameev 35:22
I think that, as I already mentioned in the beginning, so I've been conducting a kind of free promo campaigns for translators who were eager or eagerly joining this activity in our group. So once a week, we conducted a promo Wednesday, it was called like promo Wednesday, when everyone in the group could share their blog posts share their websites, or pages on Facebook, or something like this. And other members will also join this activity supported other members by liking their pages, sharing information about them. This was a kind of an initial step in online marketing, marketing. This way, we tried to help translators get, like initial exposure on the web, to see how it works, how you can get followers, how you can get shares and so on. So but some time later, this activity went to like went to zero, so not there were one and the same people like maybe 50 people who join this activity regularly. And not so many new people who were ready to spend some time just to click Like and write a command to another page. So I decided to stop this activities, this promo activity, maybe I will resume it later, but not now. So maybe these these kind of free promo activities might be a good step in the initial stages, but not on the next stages. Now I primarily I'm trying to search and find interesting involving articles, maybe some good webinars which can be which can be which can bring benefit to our members and share it at especially at a special bedtime, when most people will see it. So bringing the right information to the right audience. I think that that is not to direct maybe answer for this question, but at least we try to information to provide the right information to our members who invest their time in the community right now. And also, I'm trying to answer all the questions that appear in the group, at least, those questions so that they can answer based on my expertise like these

Vova Zakharov 37:51
guys, for some ironic reason that a lot of cash questions came in the end, I see that y'all wants to answer that question about the education gap. Unfortunately, we don't have time for these because we'll be cut off the air lacking in 30 seconds. But anyway, I wanted to thank you very much. young lawyer, Simon, Aaron, I think you all were great and provided some very valuable points for our listeners. I hope so. So make sure to join all the communities mentioned localize women in localization, successful freelance translators and our Canossa community. I'm not sure how exactly you can join it. But you can reach out to all of us on LinkedIn and we will help you and Max is already here. So he will probably tell me to shut up and like, go on.

Max Morkovkin 38:41
Yep, I give the same. Thank you. The panelists, thank you all for moderating this and we appreciate the great timing

Jan Hinrichs 38:51
for having for having us and best wishes to all the communities out there, lock life compromised dinos and of course SmartCAT community here. Great to have us pricings thanks a lot.

Max Morkovkin 39:06
Thank you very much.