In-house production models — pros and cons

Bryan Montpetit 00:06
It's a panel discussion, actually, my apologies for in house production models, pros and cons. So that's going to be very interesting for those people who like to have resources in house and see what the pros and cons are of that. Sounds good. I think, Rodrigo, you're currently muted. I don't know if you can unmute yourself.

Rodrigo Cristina 00:23
Yeah. Hi. Hi, everyone. Yeah, not too bad. Not too bad. Not too bad. It's fantastic. Grade Eight again in Manchester, UK as as as per usual, so nothing really changes. It's the new normal. Well, the old normal in UK, I guess.

Bryan Montpetit 00:43
Yeah, I do recall. Actually, I look back fondly when I used to live in the UK. I don't think I had, I think my camera froze. I apologize for that. But when I did live in the UK, I have fond memories. And I don't think it was all great all the time. So it's a that's a myth. It's a myth. All right. So I'll be turning off my camera and turning over the presentation to you. I'll let you introduce your panelists. And I'll come back in towards the end of the session.

Rodrigo Cristina 01:08
Sure, absolutely. Well, thank you. And good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are. I hope you're having a great time in the lock from home event. I think before we start our discussion and an introductions, let me congratulate smart cats crew for the excellent event that they have once again, put together. It's awesome to be here and to be part of this lock from home community. Let me quickly introduce myself, the panelists and the topic. My name is Rodrigo Kristina. And localization has been part of my day to day for a big chunk of the last 15 years. I've recently joined ti works, which is, you know, an exciting global LSP and an ambitious growth project. Fun fact about me apart my My surname is that once in Stockholm, I got a ticket while having a meeting in my rental car with the localization manager of notorious global brands. Let me now introduce you to our incredible panelists. I will start by introducing Astaire from indeed.com. Those are the thing that localization stakeholders do not like to get their hands dirty, like actual finger squishing in the soil, kind of dirty as to prove them wrong. But a very young age, her passion for archaeology propelled her to a higher education in that area. And she worked also in a couple of days. Nowadays, getting her hands dirty means growing food and vegetables. So it's the new normal I guess. Esther has been helping brands create great user experiences across global markets for the last 20 years. She is currently a localization Operations Manager with indeed a job site available in more than 60 countries. So welcome, Mr. And we are so excited to have you here. Our second panelist is Isabel vice. From Alpha crc, a Swiss national and an avid downhill skier Isabel is an example of EnTERPreneurship in a time when Swiss women didn't even vote, Isabel is a great example of how love for languages, hardwork, and competence can turn a one woman band into a global company that now employs some 350 people, mostly linguists, she was convinced at the time that a collaborative approach allowing interaction and exchange across languages would provide an enhanced customer experience. So welcome Isabel. An immense pleasure to have you as part of the panel. Now last but not least, William Williams falling from Spotify. Our last panelist is another multifaceted localization professional. As a DJ, and party promoter. Music has definitely a place in William's heart, like in many high profile localization programs, will you manage to build a seamless integration between music and localization by recently joining Spotify as one of its localization senior project managers, William is one of localisations young rising stars, who brings LSP and localization by experience to the table. Welcome, William. Also a massive pleasure to have you here. Let me now briefly introduce the sessions topic. We, when we started talking about this particular panel, we wanted to take a deep dive into a topic that we felt is many times underrated and under spoken in localization forums, the benefits and disadvantages of choosing an in house model to deliver localization. The purpose of this discussion is not limited to to either the LSP perspective, or the, in this case, the LSP perspective. So we brought Esther and William to listen to their perspective on on the buyer side. So our starting point for this particular discussion will be a definition of what goes on, or what an in house production model looks like. So I can kick it off, and then I will pass it to each of the panelists. So, the way I see an in house localization model is, I would say almost in a romantic way, as probably an incredibly refined example of of a beautifully designed and crafted translation ecosystem with all of its components aligned and exchanging information. And this information can be anything from from concepts, ideas, terminology, language preferences, and ultimately, when the model matures, it defines what best localization practices look like. So all of this is combined to deliver localization. So I think it's, I think I've spoken enough, so it's a good time. Right timing to pass it to our to our panelists. I would love to start with Isabel and then go to the roundtable. So Isabel, being the founder and owner of alpha, an LSP, with an extensive internal team, how would you briefly define, in your own words, what an in house localization model looks like? I think you are on mute.

Bryan Montpetit 06:58
It looks like there is some audio issue, his belt, she is not muted. So perhaps we can start with someone else just too, and will enable her to give her some time to fix the fix the issue?

Rodrigo Cristina 07:13
Sure, absolutely. Is steroids want to take the lead?

Esther Curiel 07:18
Sure. Thanks very much. How do you go? I think it was more than I think it's different, whether you're speaking about the, the LSP side or render side, you know, or client side. I've worked on on both. And I can see how different I suppose the the model should be, like being client side, you don't want your internal team during House team to be any larger than it needs to be at all. And you absolutely don't want them to be performing tasks that an external vendor could perform just as well. So I think for me, the definition of an in house model, client side would be very much just the type of team that would liaise well with the rest of the internal functions within within the organization that look after that content journey. There were discussions earlier on in this conference, about the place of localization, you know, in the user journey, the content Jordan, so

Isabelle Weiss 08:19
everything twice.

Esther Curiel 08:24
Yeah, I think I just finished, maybe, I mean, we can turn it over to Isabel again. So we

Rodrigo Cristina 08:35
Yes, we can hear you, Isabel loud and clear. Can you hear me now? Absolutely.

Isabelle Weiss 08:40
Because I was hearing I was I was hearing Esther twice. Okay. Should I be quick? Thank you again, Rodrigo. I know you have this very romantic vision of what it's like to have an in house model. And of course, I started with that romantic vision as well. Basically, my idea was that translation in a sense, is a cooperative effort. And that people who work alone from the kitchen sink, without any interaction with colleagues, within their own language or across language teams, would not be able to produce the same kind of quality as I was envisaging for myself and for the company. So the idea was very much to have different language teams working with each other. French people would be able to check any problems they had or issues or language questions within their own team, but also with a team like, say the Spanish people or the Italian people. And of course, it wasn't just linguists. It was also technical support. Desktop Publishing graphics, etc. And the romantic idea was that the translator would be involved from the start of the project over translation revision QA, see how the graphics were being done, intervene at any stage to make sure that everything looked okay was okay, the hyphenation was okay. Audio recording was okay. So it was really a vision, that translation is not just taking a source and bringing it to a target language, but it involves lots of other components. And the closer these components were, the better in my view, would be the quality. However, there was a bit more than that. I also felt that the interaction with the client was important that the identification with projects with clients with products would be important. And that meant that continuity was important so that the same translator would be involved over time with particular clients, they would know their preferences, they would know their projects, they would know what they liked what they didn't like. And this, of course, would be not just for the translators advantage, or for my company's advantage, but also to the clients advantage. So the clients would know, the translators that were involved in their project. And the translators, in turn, would actually own the project. Because what I had seen in the past, working as a freelancer was that you would be involved from time to time with particular projects, that there was no continuity, there was no interaction, there was no feedback. And these were components that I felt were very important. I also felt that translators, especially if they worked outside of their own linguistic environment, they needed a constant exchange on a linguistic level with people from their own language community. And I think now that we are doing more transcreation we are creating slogans we are creating sometimes poetry, all sorts of things, it's even more important to have that exchange rather than to be working in isolation. So these were the main ideas, I felt it would be an advantage for the translators, because they weren't working alone, they didn't have to run off the clients, they didn't have to be project managers at the same time, they could really concentrate on the translation. And it will be an advantage for us as a company, because we have better control. We can look after the continuity of the translation and the projects. We can also assess, and monitor and coach the translators. And it would definitely be for the benefit of the clients who could count on a much better identification, ownership by the translators. And the constant exchange of ideas

Rodrigo Cristina 13:50
is brilliant. Thank you very, very much all very valid and strong points. Pro, or in terms of definition of what an in house production model looks like. I'd like to pass on to William but ask him at the same time question. Would you consider you know, in case you would be considering adopting greenhouse production model, that you would have an in house production model, if you only had part of what Isabel mentioned. So for example, if you have only one, you know, I don't know project management or The Linguist function, or desktop publishing or engineering.

William Spalding 14:34
So just to clarify, Could you could you reiterate the question, like, a single one of those functions isn't?

Rodrigo Cristina 14:41
Yeah, yeah. If you could, would you consider it an in house production model?

William Spalding 14:46
Yeah, you know, um, I don't think I would, I think I would consider it more of a hybrid model, I think, on the buyers side. Being able to scale and in house production model is really difficult and any wall, oftentimes, certain functions will come in house, perhaps localization engineering, obviously PMSing, sometimes language specialists and language management, I do think oftentimes we see more of a hybrid model. So I wouldn't consider a single component of the whole, like production workflow for, for localization, being in house to be an in house model. And I also wouldn't even consider outsourced PMS contracted and working in house to be an in house model, either I think, an in house model would, as far as I define it, it would be an end to end production line, all managed inside the organization with zero outsourced agency work. That is,

Rodrigo Cristina 15:47
yeah, that's really, really good point. And thank you all for your contribution in the definition. Thanks. Thanks to the thank you to the three of us, the three of you, sorry. I think we're ready now to you know, to move to the sort of core question. You know, or the core discussion is, you know, why should an end client or an LSP, setup an in house production model? So, I will launch a couple of topics that we can develop? Namely, there is one that immediately comes to mind, which is, does the under one roof the in house production model, deliver consistently better translation quality than the most commonly outsourced model? Or is it a myth? I'd like to start by asking, is there her take on this?

Esther Curiel 16:57
Yeah, I strongly feel that they house more than is really beneficial for quality, I think you get very well founded, like, in the case of linguist, if you want to take the discussion towards linguists, perhaps I feel that exposure, you know, not not just too many different clients and the different tools, you can get that you have freelancers, well, the exposure to engineers to desktop publishers, to project managers in the organization and client client exposure. That gives you such well rounded linguist, that to me, that's, that's a huge advantage. So, you know, when I'm hiring myself, if I see people who have that, in their CV, who have that, in house experience, you know, that that's always a, like, it's always a plus, it's always something I love seeing, especially if there have been dealing with some, you know, they have had that kind of exposure to the client and client's needs line complaints and so on. That gives them I think you can talk about, you know, it's kind of an extension almost of University of college in a very practical way. So for me, that's, yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't have any doubts.

Rodrigo Cristina 18:12
I can, I can foresee Isabel's take on this one as well. Isabel, would you care to contribute? Well, I

Isabelle Weiss 18:22
think it will be very wrong to say that freelance linguists can't be excellent translators. I, you know, I don't want to do freelance bashing. I think that will be very wrong. There are obviously some very responsible, very talented freelancers, and I'm the last person to deny that. But I think if you take your average translator, I definitely do think that because they get probably better job satisfaction. And better, as I said, before, identification with projects and with clients, I do think they feel more responsible about the quality. And there is also the peer to peer relationship, which I think forces the linguists to really give their best. Because if you're in a group, and you get consistently, bad feedback, and you get a lot of complaints from the person that is revising you or reviewing you, then I think, you know, you either pull yourself together because you really want to do a good job, or you can play or you change profession. And I just think because of the support and because of the community that you're constantly working in, I think your chances that you can do a good or an excellent translation are better. And also your company always knows what you're working on. So They don't overload you. Whereas if you're a freelancer, a lot of the time, you have to work at night, you have to work over the weekend, more people are sending you stuff all the time, very different types of things, perhaps. And if you're in a company, in house model, you kind of feel cared for. And you can raise your hand and you can say, Hang on, I need help here, or I'm not so familiar with this particular thing. Can I get somebody else to help me? So that's still, you know, my main take on the on the whole thing?

Rodrigo Cristina 20:37
Thank you, Isabel. Thank you, I would love to hear Williams take on this one.

William Spalding 20:43
Yeah, you know, I definitely agree with all that, I think, in house models, enabled those opportunities and enable that that environment and that feedback loop and that support structure that in turn, encourages better work, better job satisfaction, better engagement, more ownership over the products and projects. But I would like to flip it on the other side and say that I do think it's possible to work with vendor partners, outside agencies, throughout source models and also create that environment. Provide that that ownership, create that those feedback loops, the correct resources channels to the stakeholders. I do think that while an in house model just naturally has that environment already established that it is possible to create that and an outsourced model, and, you know, leverage some of those opportunities.

Rodrigo Cristina 21:46
Great, great. Great, great, thank you very much, William, for your also very interesting opinion about the topic. I would like to launch still on the pros, per se, of setting up an in house approach, I would like to launch and this I think more likely for, for William and for is there, you know, intellectual property protection, and IT security play an incredibly important role. When opting for for a particular language service provider as a vendor. Namely, in highly regulated industries, for example, would you say, in your particular cases, or the experience that you've gathered, over the years, that you would be feeling more protected? If you were choosing an LSP? That positive mass production model that works within within the same team or with the same team of linguists? As their

Esther Curiel 22:56
I suppose I will look, it hasn't really come up, like I have worked on LSPs in the past, both with an in house more than with a completely outsourced model. And it is possible to work with external external resources, you know, while still protecting IP and so on. So it's not a complete? No, no, it wouldn't be a complete No, no, but it has to be very well managed. So I suppose the preference would probably still be to have it monitoring house. Very interesting for the necessary.

William Spalding 23:33
Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, I think as far as you know, information security and such NDAs are going to be signed, whether it's with an agency that subcontracting or with freelancers, and those need to be upheld all the same. So I think legality wise the, the protections are more or less there, no matter the model, but I do think with everything managed in house under one roof, and you know, there's less risk of those contracts being breached and whatnot. Absolutely.

Rodrigo Cristina 24:05
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So another another pro for the, for the in house model. This, I would say another I have a question. That's more. I think it's more for Isabel. In terms of, you know, MT is such a big thing, it's not going to go away, it's gonna get stronger, it's gonna get bigger, it's gonna get faster, it's gonna get more productive and hopefully better quality as well as time goes by and data emerges. Would you say in your experiences about that in generally speaking, both when it comes to new capsules, or, for example, deploying machine translation across across alpha, do you feel that It might be easier to deploy any sort of, or any kind of language technology supporting the linguists. If you have them working for you on premises in house, then if you're using freelance linguists,

Isabelle Weiss 25:20
well, well, again, I don't want to generalize too much, I'm sure there are lots of freelancers who are very innovative and who like trying out the latest technology. But again, if you take your average sort of linguist who, by nature, can be quite conservative, I think our people here at all, so they get a lot of help from our technical people from our operations people, we can easily organize kind of person to person, tuition, we can do workshops, people can help each other across the desk, if they suddenly have to use a new tool. Because however much we try to perhaps standardize on two or three cad tools, there are always clients who insist on their own propriety proprietary tools, that may not be very easy to use. And so the linguists might get frustrated if they sit at home, as we see now with COVID. I think there are many more problems now with people working from home, not being able to solve problems not being able to cope with new features, or people just forgetting to switch on the empty plugin, or not being quite sure how to make the best of certain technical features. So I do think we have an advantage there. I mean, I myself, I'm quite conservative in some ways, but I very much believe in empty and the help that empty can give us these days. And I think it's easier for me to spread that kind of enthusiasm, when I've actually got the people around me, and I can show them how I'm using it and so on. So yes, definitely, I think with that, we also have an advantage. And I remember a time 20 years ago, when we did also use quite a lot of freelancers, how some of them just simply said, Well, I'm an excellent translator, I don't need a CAT tool. Now convincing those people at the time that you couldn't survive without capitals anymore, was actually quite difficult. So if there is a conservative streak in the freelance population, I think it's quite difficult to overcome that sometimes and convince them to go with the times.

Rodrigo Cristina 28:04
Very, very interesting. perspective, I think we've, we've been taking discussion towards the pros, or in favor of the in house production model, but I'm certain that there is a very valid reason why this particular model is either a hybrid model, or not used at all, in some order, the vast majority of of LSDs. So my question now, and this is sort of for the whole panel. In terms of scalability, and I guess that's probably the question that's most presently in people's minds. Is it really a problem? And how those, you know, an LSP, for example, deal with the scalability issue? Does it hire more translation, translators? Or internal translators? Or does it complement or feeling or bridge the gap with external resources? What do you guys think about it? I can start with now William.

William Spalding 29:22
Yeah, you know, I think on the LSP side, the the argument is different, I believe, then, you know, within a buyer organization. My thoughts on the LSP said, I think, you know, economies of scale are like is the big thing, right? That's what we're discussing here, being able to outsource to a vendor that already has a huge fleet of linguists or resources and various technical areas available. So a single contract can suddenly open doors to hundreds of new teammates, right. And on the flip side, not are in that same vein, not having to make manage each individual contract of every single linguist and all the vendor management that would come be involved in that. So I think, yeah, I think there's, there's definite cons, or not necessarily cons, but but risks and challenges to overcome. And I think

Rodrigo Cristina 30:18
the

William Spalding 30:21
size of the organization, the types of projects, the, the quality expectations of of, you know, at least for me, on the buyer side, I have expectations of my quality. And depending on the budget resource and organizational like top down leadership support that I have, I can do, I can make certain decisions to enable my program in different ways. And so I think that scale piece is huge, at least on the buyer side, I will outsource before I bring in house if I don't have headcount, if I don't have a budget to support expanding teams and bringing these resources in house. So yeah, I definitely think the nature of the organization, its size, its state of maturity, and as well as its specific business needs, play a huge role in those decisions.

Rodrigo Cristina 31:11
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. Thank you. Thank you very much, William Astaire, I would like to listen to your take on this specialty, because I'm assuming that you know, indeed, volumes, make scalability and response capacity an issue. Whenever choosing a vendor, so would you be slightly more concerned with that particular issue, if you were choosing or opting for a vendor that has an in house production model?

Esther Curiel 31:52
We use, we use when there's, yeah, do not necessarily have a house production model, or that have a hybrid. I mean, most people have a hybrid model these days anyways, it can work perfectly fine as well, we also have internal linguists ourselves. And I think they add, they add an awful lot of value to the organization, to the organization as well. Like William said, you know, it's all about cost and what value you're gonna get through your during house people. So for us, it's very much about that, the learning to use your teams in a clever way. So that, again, you're not duplicating effort or carrying out effort, that the vendors are very well positioned to carry out. So that's the way we are using our teams, within Indeed, our localization specialist teams, for instance, would be very much geared towards enabling the vendors to deliver what we need in terms of quality and so on. Enabling them and I suppose bridging the gap between the internal leads that are not always well known and not always easily expressed to a vendor. And the capabilities, the external resources, the external linguist might bring themselves.

Rodrigo Cristina 33:16
Not great. Yeah. As well, I, I have, you know, on the sort of cons, and this is more of a risk, and perhaps, Isabelle could fill us in about about this. Isn't it too risky? To have such a large number of full time linguists in the payroll, per se, of a company in case you lose a client or you you know, is that the main risk that you will think about whenever deciding, okay, let's hire more or less linguist?

Isabelle Weiss 34:01
Yes, it's, I mean, that is the biggest problem that we're obviously having to cope with all the time, to basically assess in advance just how many people we can afford to take on, especially in the current climate climate, where our clients don't really tell us in advance what to expect. So we have very few clients, where we have an exact program and the schedule where we know, in three weeks time, we're going to get 800,000 words, in six weeks time, we're going to get 100,000 words, etc. So that indeed, is the main problem. It used to be easier when we had, perhaps more clients who really, really wanted a partnership and who wanted to cooperate with us, and who told us about their plans, what products that we're bringing out. And these days, I think, where many clients don't have a linguistic department in house anymore, their understanding of what their language vendor actually needs is very limited. So they don't realize that for us, it would be really, really helpful. And for them, it would be very beneficial as well, if we could make a plan together. So this is, like you say, it's a big risk. And it's like Esther said, you know, even us, we don't have a completely pure model anymore. We also have to add extra people, when we get when we have to scale up quite clearly. Because just because we have one project with 1 million words into German and Greek, I can't suddenly employ 12 Extra Germans and 12 Extra Greek people. So that is indeed the kind of dilemma that we're in all the time. And the other thing, I think, William mentioned that if you have particular subject areas, for instance, we were suddenly asked to do a project on military drones. Well, I don't have experts for military drones, and some of our some of our in house people refuse to do that. Because they are pacifists, you know? Or if we had something I don't know, for machines for butchers. Well, we have a lot of vegetarians here, so they're not going to be working on on butchers devices, etc. So the model does bring with it, it's absolutely useless to deny it. The model does have various shortcomings which we have to overcome by looking in the freelance community.

Rodrigo Cristina 37:13
That's super, super interesting. And thank you once again, Isabel for for sharing your your experience. I think I have the the last section of know within this topic to go through and let's see if we have some time for for some q&a. I call it the translators pathway. So I'm fully aware that a large chunk of our audience is composed of linguists, freelance linguists. So this next question is also a ties in with with our audience, how does the in house model promote an essential career journey for someone that is a linguist would you say would you say that you know, making the enlarging the scope of what means of what it means to be a linguist in in often making it a bit wider, offering other alternatives like project management engineering account management? How, how does this? How does this play in in, in your in your structure, Isabelle?

Isabelle Weiss 38:29
Well, I think the first thing, which is really important, it seems to me that if there weren't companies like alpha, that actually have an in house model, it would actually be very difficult for a lot of translators who come out of university to start out a career as a translator. Because if you're a vendor who relies totally on freelancers, you're going to ask those people, what is your experience, and somebody who comes straight out of university clearly doesn't have that experience. So we in a sense, and I see that also as an obligation for us, is to actually train young people, bring them in from the university, give them the mentoring and the coaching and the support and the help and tell them how important it is to become a good translator and make the effort. And if there weren't places like this, it will be extremely difficult for young people to actually get a foothold. So that's the first thing. The other thing is of course, when you have a lot of different positions like we have, including of course, marketing, quality assurance, sales, desktop publishing coordination project At management, the young translators can actually have a look around, they can experience every day, what else is involved in a translation company. And after a year or two years, they might come to the conclusion that translation wasn't really for them, that they weren't, they weren't quite fast enough, or they didn't have quite the talent it took, or they found maybe the introduction of machine translation too horrific to contemplate. But then I'd like to still stay within the language industry. So they would come to me and say, Well, what do you think, could I become a project assistant, and then perhaps a project manager. So I do think we offer a lot of opportunities for people, we have some people who've been with us over 20 years. They started as junior translators, they became senior translators, then they decided that they really like the technological aspects and the technical aspects. And one of them is now our operations manager, and other person has become divisional director through many stages. So there are those opportunities. And of course, there are other linguists who really don't want to be project managers, they don't want to take with extra responsibility. They don't want to go into marketing or sales, and they're just happy getting their work every day. They don't have to run after the invoicing, they don't have to remind their clients that they need to pay. They don't have to run their own website. They don't have to pay for their own cad tools, etc. So you know, there's so many different types in the language industry. And I think we provide a sort of healthy environment where a lot of people find their place.

Rodrigo Cristina 42:07
Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you, Isabel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the contribution of the three of you. It's been fantastic. Great. We have, I think, a few minutes left for a few questions that I've selected. Okay. Astaire, I think this is more for Astaire and, and William and not necessarily in the way that it's been phrased. So this question is by an awards, and she asks, Do your internal linguists at Indeed, or, you know, Fi access kind of project managers for their languages, liaising with external translation vendor? So in case, I'm going to rephrase it in case, either William or stereo, you don't have any internal linguists, for example, your subject matter experts that are part of the in country review cycle, if you prefer? Would they be liaising with external transmission vendors?

William Spalding 43:15
I can start on my side. So I can't speak unfortunately, to anything Spotify, specifically doing but my experience in enterprise programs? The short answer is yes. You know, I've seen language specialists that own the domain of their language work closely with either a single language vendor or an LV multiple language vendor, to manage the quality work closely with the linguists provide training education context, heads up on, like, you know, this projects incoming, here's the creative brief, this is the strategy. So So yeah, I think there's definite space within an in house model and linguists in house to to drive those conversations and own on the quality for their language. You know, also depending on the role of the specialists if their language manager or or supporting that, and what that looks like. I think, also in conjunction with that, there's another additional point that should be made that I think linguists that work in house, also get exposure differently than freelance linguists in the sense that they get organizational exposure to the different cross functional working groups that they might be collaborating with. And there's a ton of opportunity, if there's not enough volume to support that the work for that language to, you know, leverage and individuals skills and other technical areas in the program that might not be directly related to the translation piece. So yeah, I think that's how I see it. And I definitely think to sum up the answer that yes, they do on that relationship, and in many cases, facilitate that collaboration.

Rodrigo Cristina 44:56
Cool, cool. Cool. Thank you very much. William is there ball is on your court now.

Esther Curiel 45:02
Yeah, so for us, we don't get the question that you ask about linguists, they're not necessarily a linguist we have, we call them content localization specialists, not all of them are linguists. And that was by design as well. I wanted to confer multi disciplinary team, if you like. They do liaise with vendors, but not in a project management role or not, as it's normally understood. It's more coaching and mentoring type of relationship with them. The other big part of what they do is liaise with internal part of the organization that can bring us the insight, you know, how what the customers need, what the users need, how they might be different from users in the US, how we then might need to adapt content. So we bring that back to perhaps content creation themes, also to the external vendors. That's where the value of the team comes in. More so than you know, they hold up perhaps something which might have on the on the LSP. side,

William Spalding 46:03
I would focus on that. Yeah, I think the exposure to the different working groups across the organization and being able to bring that information back and disseminate it to the groups is very key.

Rodrigo Cristina 46:15
Oh, cool. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. I think we have enough time for one last question, Isabel's. I think so the next question that I would like to ask is, you know, in terms of the way that the volumes or the projects are assigned, in case, one, opt for a hybrid model, how would best practices come? In terms of what would you be assigning the internal teams and what would you be assigning to the external teams? How, what's your take on that? I think, I don't know if Isabel's can take this one. Perhaps. Oh, I think you're on mute, Isabel. I'm not mistaken. Yep. Now,

Isabelle Weiss 47:27
I have a bit of a problem with the sound. So I wasn't completely sure about your question. Is it how you best assign?

Rodrigo Cristina 47:34
Yes, correct? Yeah, if you have internal and external, what would be your choice?

Isabelle Weiss 47:41
Well, there's many aspects you have to take into account, I mean, first of all, is the actual volume of the work. And the the speed, the turn the turnaround that's required. I mean, obviously, the project is just so big, that you need to put 15 people on it, we cannot often put all our 15 linguist in one particular language on a thing. So we would then use a hybrid model, like you say, we would use maybe two senior people to really supervise the efforts of the freelance people. Because you just can't suddenly concentrate completely on just one project or one client. And the other thing which I also mentioned before, of course, has to do with subject matter expertise. So, you may have a particularly difficult software project, which has to do with I don't know, aeroplanes or railways, and there you simply have to go to the expert, and then may be carefully analyze the project and see once the glossary, term base has been established and the journal style and so on, you may be able to assign a team from your in house people, but you will still rely on a senior specialist to kind of supervise it and make sure that the end product is really up to scratch. Right.

Bryan Montpetit 49:27
Thank you, everyone. I appreciate your involvement participation today. We are at time so I don't want to cut anybody off but there has been a lot of comments, a lot of questions, a lot of comments but the camp