Leadership in localization

Igor Afanasayev 00:06
So, we are back. And we are now going to have a panel with four panelists, all women who will share their experience on leadership in localization. And this talk will be moderated today by Marina Ilari, who is the founder and CEO at Terra translations Marina, I will be handing the mic over to you so you can introduce the speakers. Great, thank

Marina Ilari 00:29
you. Thank you. I'm so excited to welcome this panel of outstanding professionals and leaders in localization. And yes, my name is Marina Lowry. I'm an ATA certified translator, CEO of Terra translations. And for 16 years, I've been working in the video game localization space. And I would like to welcome our panelists today, whom I have the pleasure of meeting and working closely with through women in localization, an amazing organization that we are all active members of and so yeah, we'll pass the microphone to each one of the panelists to introduce themselves. Carrie, do you want to go first?

Carrie Fischer 01:06
Sure. Can you hear me okay?

Marina Ilari 01:09
Yes, awesome.

Carrie Fischer 01:11
So hi, everyone. I'm Carrie Fisher. I'm the globalization services manager at Subway. I've been here for four years. In previous companies. I've been in charge of localization for bodybuilding.com, Oracle Hyperion solutions and transparent language. I really enjoy helping companies start their localization programs and building them up in order to succeed in global markets. I'm also the global community program manager for women in localization and the former America's geo Manager, which is how I met these wonderful ladies from women in localization, and they helped keep me sane. I live in Boise, Idaho with my 14 year old son, our dog and two cats. And I'm hoping none of them make an appearance, but apologies if they do.

Marina Ilari 01:58
completely understandable. We're looking from home. So I do you want to go next? Yeah,

Denisse Kreeger 02:08
yeah, sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Christy Sakai. I'm CEO of super Tex USA. We're an LSP. That takes a creative approach to localization. So we do focus on driving impact with transcreation and multilingual copy. So I've lived and worked in the UK, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, and now I'm in sunny LA. And yeah, I'm really excited to be part of the LA women and localization chapter. We set that up a couple of weeks years ago. And yeah, we're we're a good community here. So really happy to be on this panel. And I'll pass it on to Mica.

Nika Allahverdi 02:56
Thanks, Christy. Hi, everyone, Marina, thank you for moderating, and thank you to SmartCAT for organizing the event. I am honored to be here today. I am the Chief Marketing Officer at NIMS and sites and multilingual magazine. And MZ does research and consulting and language services scaled and localization. And multilingual writes about language services, and all sorts of happenings in the language services field. And I get to help companies grow and consult and create new opportunities to promote language services. And I have the honor of working with people all over the world with a passion for language services and with experience in the industry. So I get to learn a lot from them. And happy to be here as well.

Marina Ilari 03:44
I pass it on to Denise.

Denisse Kreeger 03:46
Hi, everyone. It's a pleasure being here. Thank you for having us, and also a big honor to be among these amazing women that I get to work with and collaborate with a little in myself. I'm Denise Krieger. I currently am the head of localization production at Riot Games. Big game publisher. In the past, I've worked at Blizzard Entertainment and other game publisher as well as Netflix. So I have over 10 years or less of localization experience. I've had the whole journey from being in translation to quality practices, QA programs all the way into leadership. So it's awesome to get to continue to see how this industry is working and having opportunities such as this one to chat more about how amazing localization is.

Marina Ilari 04:41
Great. Thank you, Denise. Well, let's dive into it then. So I wanted to tell you that I recently attended the American Translators Association Conference, where some statistics were shared that surprised me. I mean, I knew linguists were a majority of women. I mean in my translation, program at school, there were only two men in the whole class. But learning that 87% of the members of this association are women was really eye opening to me. However, there is not much diversity at all in leadership roles within the localization industry. So my question to you is, what can we do as a community to help elevate women in localization? Who wants to go first? Carrie, do want to go first?

Carrie Fischer 05:31
Sure. Yeah, it's a very good question. And it's a question that we've been asking, I think for a long time. Last year, I saw an interview with Veronique Skaia, the CEO of Argos, multilingual, and she was asked the same question. And this is what I learned and took into account from her answer. It's a matter of focusing on women you see as having potential, thinking about how you can help them grow in their careers and take them under your wing, mentor them, listen to what they want to accomplish and help them accomplishment. Thinking about my company, I'm the only one in my department who manages localization. However, I'm not the only woman in the company. I love working with younger women, coaching them, helping them build their confidence no matter what department they're in, and you're not really doing anyone a favor by celebrating mediocrity. If you see an area where they can improve, you should tell them and and celebrate, when they do do an incredible job, tell their boss tell their peers, I've gone so far as to reach out to a manager two layers above a person to tell them what a great job they did. Recently, I was asked to provide a review of a one young woman I worked with at Subway and I was so grateful for that opportunity. Because I not only got to celebrate her wins, but also point out an area for improvement, which was self confidence and leadership. This woman is so smart. She learns from her mistakes, she takes time from approved processes, she checks all the technical boxes. And now it's time for her to learn to be more of a leader. And I was equally impressed when her boss reached out to me and said, we're on the same page. And I'll work with her on the skills and that boss is a man by the way. Thinking Outside my company, I really enjoy working with women in localization. Even though we do have a formal mentorship program, I can also get mentored and be mentored, and be a mentor for every day, from an inner day everyday interactions with the organization. There's so many powerful and empowered women in that organization. And it's really elevated myself confidence because they in turn have empowered me and made me realize that I have a lot to offer to and I want to give back to others in the women and localization organization. So I can help elevate women, even though it's a channel outside of work, it's still very valuable.

Marina Ilari 07:57
Absolutely. Do you want to go next Christie?

Kristy Sakai 08:01
Yeah, sure.

Denisse Kreeger 08:03
Yeah. Yeah, I think everyone kind of feels anecdotally that localization is an industry where women cancer sort of thrive. I thought about this a little bit, I think it's probably, you know, it's quite a flexible industry. We're all working remotely now. But even before I think, you know, localization was fairly flexible in terms of hours and locations. So that's, I think those are things generally, that are really important for women working anyway. So I think, you know, as an industry, we're set up to allow women to thrive. But I was also really surprised because I read like a statistic that like, there's like a 19%, Kate pay gap or something still, in our industry. And men are still overrepresented in top management positions. And that's that's kind of tells me that there's something internally that either company's client side or vendor side, that we're doing something not quite right. And when you look into, like, what that could be, it is quite the same as any other industry, right. So I think we have, you know, a good way to attract women, but promoting them, that seems to be a different story. So those are things that, you know, we can probably do a lot more for, I think things like, you know, having like, regular performance review cycles, so that you're not waiting for people to come and ask for a pay rise that could like, you know, reduce the pay gap or paternity leave maternity leave, things like that. Those are things that I think about, and I think we've managed to implement that really well in our company. And then I think, yeah, as Carrie said, like women in localization, I think the best thing of something like women in localization is that you get to have role models and To add mentors, and those are really important, I think when you talk to, I've had people reach out to me that are surprised that an Asian woman is leading a team. And I think that just having that kind of visibility, and being able to think that that's a possibility, that's that's a really, really important thing to know. That that's, that's possible. So I think those are things that I try and do, like panels like this, I think are super important. And yeah, that's, that's how I approach this.

Marina Ilari 10:43
Mica, do you want to go next?

Nika Allahverdi 10:45
Yeah, sure. Marina, the statistic that you bring up about 87% of the 80 members or woman is surprising. But then again, it's not really surprising, because a lot of us come from a translation background. And we know that there are a lot of women in translation, or a lot of Yeah, women in translation, not only woman in an interpreter roles and translation roles, but a lot of my colleagues that I know, are females. But at the same time, we have some amazing women in our industry that are in management roles. Some of them are on this panel with us today. And I think that in education, with my Bachelor's degrees in linguistics in French, and I think that a lot of education doesn't in bachelor programs doesn't necessarily prepare you for localization as an industry, a lot of people go into bachelor's degrees, because they have a passion for language. And I'm not putting down language programs across the world. But I do notice that the students that I talked to, in bachelors programs that are studying language, don't really know what localization is, and don't know what are the opportunities of localization, or how you can use your passion for language outside of the traditional translation role, which is how a lot of us still ended up here today. But I do want to say that a lot of women who are thought leaders in our industry have a lot to say, and it's, it's really great to see that. Thank you, Tom. Then

Denisse Kreeger 12:31
I'll come in, of course, some of the areas have been covered here. But I want to echo and highlight the mentorship part and the responsibility that we have as leaders. We are here to motivate to empower to work on those around us that have this potential and really hone in on them. I think it's very common for us to have impostor syndrome. And I think it's especially for women, this is a big deal, right? We feel like, are we good enough? Yes, we are. And I think that's the theme that we need to continue to push, and also be that role model to all the younger generations that are coming in to tell them yes, there's a place for you, there's a spot here for you. And we're here to help you get there. On the other side of the coin, I think this is also a call to action to all the leaders that are out there that our men support us and help us because, of course, we can do the job, right, we're doing it and we have so much knowledge in this community, because there are so many women involved. We just need to continue to have the path forward to be more to see more leaders. I want these panels to be filled with women in the future. And I think we can all do that together.

Marina Ilari 13:45
Oh, I love that, Denise. Thank you. And yeah, everything you're saying is so inspiring. By the way, I'm like, Yes. I'd love to talk more about elevating localization as a whole. Right? So this is so important, because some people still like, don't really know what localization is or equal localization with translation, even making it seem like, like a commodity. But obviously, localization has so much more than that. Were opening markets were facilitating global revenue. So what can you share with us about ways in which you elevate localization in your current roles? And how do you describe your roles, taking into account the value that your work brings? Marina, may I speak to that? Yes, yes, please. All right. So

Nika Allahverdi 14:44
localization is far more than translation. I think a lot of the people listening here today, and maybe on YouTube later or whatever, know that, but that doesn't mean that a lot of the startups that are sprouting out now know that or a lot of companies are thinking about localization and in advance. From a marketing perspective, localization is very important to me specifically, because marketers are able to see a product or service, and understand how it will resonate with a certain audience or a certain market. So localization, of course, plays a really big role into that. And it for localization facilitates this connection on a global scale. So I'm really happy to be in the position that I am. And I'm actually kind of in an interesting position. When I was at miss the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, we kind of get to see what happens on the LSP side. And what happens on the enterprise side, I'm kind of an interesting space, because I'm in a consulting place. And in a place that publishes research on localization, and we write about localization. So part of my role is to make that information accessible to the people who are at companies that are looking to grow. And I'm really happy that I'm able to do that. And I'm constantly going to be evangelizing for localization.

Marina Ilari 16:17
Carry Do you want to go next,

Carrie Fischer 16:17
an ongoing battle, isn't it? I really, you know, I was going to talk about the pandemic and how that was an unlikely way that elevated localization and me at Subway, it did, by the way, but only working insane hours and delivering everything that people asked for on time. And, and quite frankly, it shouldn't take a pandemic to elevate your position, or localization. And by the way, that's not really a practical example. But if you do continually exceed people's expectations, if you help departments or regions in their localization journey and educate them on what they could be doing better and faster, you will be recognized, which in turn elevates localization, even if you're tasked to one department. If you see other departments or teams struggling with localization, and they don't have anyone to help them, help them, be accessible, be approachable. That's how I elevated myself from managing localization for one department to managing localization for the whole company. How I've done it to other companies is to think outside the box, make localization fun. I hosted a costume party on Halloween and asked the CEO to be the costume judge. I posted fun localization facts all around the conference room and asked a localization trivia questions for prizes. I dressed up as SpongeBob SquarePants. Stand out, get noticed even in unconventional ways. It's an opportunity for people to ask you what you do for the company. And be sure to have your smart and snappy answer ready. Another activity that elevated localization within my company without me even realizing it was my participation and volunteering for women in localization. I'd always kept my volunteer work and my day job separate or so I thought that I was the member spotlight in our women in localization newsletter last summer, Rachel Lord posted on LinkedIn about that member spotlight piece. And the reactions that came in from former colleagues at past jobs, friends from the industry and even current colleagues at Subway was really surprising. And when my boss saw it, he made sure to call attention to it in a huge departmental meeting. He's really proud of the work I do in and out of subway. And that was something that I never expected. As for describing my role, I not only manage localization at Subway, but I'm also the person who's constantly looking at new solutions and strategies to help subway save money, get more content through localization processes faster without sacrificing quality. I put together a one page presentation about how much money I've saved my company in one year. And that tends to get people's attention.

Marina Ilari 19:10
Yes, that's very interesting. I suggested changing the name of the conference to fun luck from home next year, based on what Kerry just said. Just getting to Christie's Do you have anything else to add to this?

Denisse Kreeger 19:26
Yeah, I mean, I can add to like an example that I think maybe everyone's probably been in the situation where I was in at a marketing conference and like a founder of a company there. It's like, what do you do? Or what does your company do? And it's always like, so tricky to explain what localization is because it's not first it's, it's complex. And second, not many people know. And third, you kind of have to gauge like, where's this person? Does he understand anything about localization? Or do you start from Like, well, there's so I kind of fumbled through this. And I was talking about like going global and, and he just said, like, so why would this be a good thing for my company? And I just thought that's, that's a really good question. Because that's kind of what it comes down to everything that we're doing. It's essentially about how does this benefit the business? And so yeah, I explained to him, you know, that you everything that you've put into building your brand, and the assets that you have, and all the product, if you take all that effort, and then you scale it to the whole world, that's kind of the localization process. And it's actually a really good deal, because you're getting to reach like millions more people by putting in like, the fraction of the time and effort and money that you might have spent, like five years building now. And I think that was that's kind of like the approach that I tried to take now, when I want to talk about localization is just focusing on sort of that aspect of the business side. And it's really easy to get into like the, like technology side and the processes and but I think, you know, as to elevate localization as a whole, it's really important to keep the big picture in mind.

Marina Ilari 21:33
Yes, I couldn't agree with you more. And this is a great segue into our next question, which is about ROI and localization. The question, right, is it possible to measure ROI? And what metrics do you use to showcase the real value of localization, I'm curious to see Carrie and Denise on the buyer side, it's definitely

Denisse Kreeger 21:58
a very challenging conversation. Now, I'll begin, even internally for us to find what points of measure to take, I've seen both extremes I've seen those that give up and say are, it's too artistic, we can't measure it. And then I've seen the other extreme, right, where we want to measure everything. But then we completely go into the black and white scenario where we know localization sits a lot in the gray. So I think first thing is understanding that and accepting that and also being able to define what can be measured that's meaningful, right there is there are areas of localization that are either right or wrong. But then we should be comfortable that there are areas of localization that are more subjective. And so finding guidelines and common ground on how we weighed those two sides is very important. But it's also going to be very dependent on the product on the standards on the outcome. Certainly, I think that I struggle with this on a regular basis, especially being in an entertainment industry. Casting a voice even can be subjective, right, and it goes into the localization pipeline, you know, defining a joke or adapting a joke in a different, you know, language can be extremely challenging. And you can get I guarantee, you get five linguists in the same room, debating over that joke, and they're not going to agree on it. Right. So how do you measure that part? So I think there are ways from a business perspective to take that that piece that's binary that has more black and white, create those standards, and then execute on them as much as possible. But the education piece of that art, that craft that goes into translation, I think is important to also highlight as we move and navigate these conversations about measuring quality. And I think, Carrie, you probably have some great examples here on how you've, you've succeeded at some of these conversations, which can be very, very tricky.

Carrie Fischer 24:01
They are tricky. And you're right, some of it is black and white, and it is important to measure the stuff that you can measure. You know, just looking at yearly sales, versus how much you spent per language, right. So I finally got to do that at Subway, I finally got my hands on the subway sales reports and from a purely monetary standpoint, looked at ROI, and it was in the 10s of 1000s. So I stopped checking on monetary ROI at Subway at that point. We certainly have the return on our investment. So I really, you know at Subway i The metrics I use to show the value of localization is the kind of the basics you know how much we save each year using translation memory, having one TMS decentralized or translated content. You know, before I came, the departments within subway did their own thing. So it was kind of easy, I was able to show them, you know the value of a centralized approach So now I'm starting to play with, you know, machine translation and showing the value of a curated mTQ. You start with the basics, I think and grow from there. But software was different software is very different from the food industry. So when I worked in that industry, we did measure ROI very carefully. When I was at Hyperion solutions before Oracle bought us, I had a very large budget. And naturally, the CFO, you know, wanted to understand where we were spending our money. So he and I would partner up, and we came up with an ROI calculation per country, we looked at a lot of data points, you know, into for consideration, for example, you know, if Japan didn't make their, whatever, 10 times ROI, the fact that English was not tolerated was taken into account. And we would meet at the end of each year, look at our ROI numbers reach out to the countries who were struggling to understand why they what they needed, in order to be more successful. From a localization standpoint, it was really a true partnership with the C suite, and the region's. And you know, for newer markets, which we call the emerging markets, the ROI was lower, because we wanted to give them a chance to build up that business in their markets, you have to globalize certain markets, if you want to sell your stuff, teaching your manager and the C suite and other decision makers, this is very crucial, you know, common sense, advisory first report that I can remember, always can't read won't buy. So show them that report, I think if you need a starting point.

Denisse Kreeger 26:30
And carry just to sorry, just to add one note to what you said on the return of investment when it comes to new emerging markets, that's a very, very good conversation there. Because we want instant gratification or sometimes, you know, the receiving wants that instant gratification. But the reality is that globalization and investment, it is an investment by default, right? So it has to take a certain amount, of course, before you see how it starts giving back. And it will, you know, that's the whole point of globalization. But there has to be a comfort level of that investment, where you're not going to see that instant gratification immediately. But it's definitely worth it and to communicate that is going to be key to be successful in in continuing to grow.

Marina Ilari 27:15
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. And well, I think we can also all agree that given localized visibility to the work that we do, is is so important, because of all of this, we're talking so and localization in house teams are usually not very big, but they have this huge responsibility, right of delivering the right content glove globally, in a timely manner. So I'm curious to know, how do you navigate the stakeholders and the clients? Education, one would say, when it comes to localization, the needs do you want to go first on that one? Sure. I

Denisse Kreeger 28:00
going to start by touching a little bit on what Nika mentioned, which is the fact that there aren't a lot of educational programs out there that put us in localization other than a translation track. So by default, I think a lot of the industries have ended up with localization knowledge, that's just acquired in a job. Which means there are many times some gaps on what that knowledge actually is, because you have to put it in practice, you have to go through it, there's no you know, kind of mentorship education all the time in some of these companies. And I'm talking on on the client side. So my biggest thing is to hire people that understand localization on the client side, as much as you can, because that makes the collaboration with our language service providers, so much smoother. And you know, it begins by speaking the same language. So the piece of collaboration becomes extremely important. If you have in house resources, whether you're working with them closely on the client or on the, you know, supporting side on the vendor side, that bridge of communication is going to be key for success. It's also going to be key for success in the sense of what are the standards and the guidelines that you're trying to create on your end so that you can again, speak the same language and meet those together. It's very easy. We're talking about ROI. We're talking about measuring quality and localization. It's very easy to say, Oh, this is terrible. What does that mean? So defining that is super important that to happen on both sides and that agreement to happen. So I think collaborate. Collaboration is going to be key in order for the successful partnerships and collaboration. We happens if there's knowledge and education on both sides.

Marina Ilari 29:45
That's right. Chrissy

Denisse Kreeger 29:50
know that's really interesting. Denise what you just said because it brings up Mike, we're working on a very big project currently and this is one of those rare occasions where as on the vendor side, we are kind of sitting in on both the localization team of the client, but also their other teams. I think a lot of times, we are kind of the like, so everything goes through the localization team and then comes through to the vendor. And you don't really see what's behind the screens on the on that side. And for this project, we've had the chance to or they were kind of, you know, it was so big that they had to bring us in at a very early stage. And we are able to have weekly meetings with all stakeholders. And the level of that transparency has helped us so much really understand, like the overall needs of the project, the client, and you can also see how they're changing their mindset. So they're doing things like adapting the assets to be more locally sessionable. And so it's like a two way thing where like, yeah, that that communication, and being very involved has really helped us realize this project. So yeah, that's, that's, I think that's really key. What you said, Denise, adds, it's really great to see like, that people that are not just in the localization teams are seeing the impact and really feeling it of the localization aspects. So yeah, I would add that I would always see these partnerships as true partnerships, right, not just throwing things over the fence. This is something that I always highlight in every team that I manage, or I lead is we're not just throwing things over the fence, we want them to be an extension of us, right. So that means that we have to put our part we have to educate and also really help the the partner understand what we need, where we coming from, give them the resources so that we can be aligned, and we can have that extension happening. And I think it's beneficial, Christy, you might add, or might agree or not here, but it's beneficial, because there could be things that you're learning from one partnership that you can then apply to to another one, and so on. So so definitely that collaborative nature, I think is key.

Marina Ilari 32:25
Okay, absolutely. So we're running out of time, we have one last question. And I'd like to talk about resources. So the American Translators Association has this booklet, which is a guide to buy in translation called translation getting it right. And which I think is a great resource. Do you have any practical tips, materials approaches, anything you can share with our audience today regarding elevating localization, and also people watching here? If you have any resources? Share them in the chat?

Nika Allahverdi 33:05
Yeah, I'll add real quick that recently, I hired a couple of marketing coordinators, who were not very familiar with the localization industry yet, but we're very interested in it. So I asked them to get Twitter accounts and start following as many people as they can, following companies following seeing what other people are doing, and gravitate towards that and learn as much as you can. We have so many resources today, we mentioned clubhouse at our meeting the other the other day, there are so many opportunities to learn. And if you can put yourself in a place where you're just absorbing information from different sides, you're going to be able to go outside the box and think about things in a way that maybe you weren't able to do that before. So I would say use Twitter, if you are in our industry, because Twitter is a very, very immediate tool, and also LinkedIn. But start following the people who are thought leaders and companies that are doing things that you want to see your company do as well.

Marina Ilari 34:16
That's great advice. Denise, do you have something else to to add to the resource stack? Yeah, I

Denisse Kreeger 34:25
think we touched a little bit on this earlier and I believe Kerry mentioned this about education, making it fun. What I have found is, localization can be actually really exciting and fun and interesting to most people. It's just about how we communicate that to them and how do we find common language common ground, and also, localization is nowadays in everything. You can talk to an engineer about localization to an UX UI designer, you can talk to a A lawyer about localization because of spatial, they specialize in that, right. So there's so many different pieces of common ground that you can find identify those, identify those and bring them into that mindset of, look, this, this is important because of, you know, X, and that, if that's common ground for them, they're going to be more interested, they're going to look at it from a different angle. I'll give an example. When I was at, at Netflix, we were having some challenges, communicating what goes into dubbing, the amount of effort and creativity and all the different stages that doing a dove takes. And so for those that are on the English, you know, they're they're English native speakers that don't consume things in Dutch, not until more recently. That was a very jarring and weird experience. And they didn't understand why it took so long. And what was the cost of it. So with the team, we created this dubbing one on one experience where we partnered with a studio in LA, and we started bringing the VPS to directors, the engineers, for them to sit in through a recession. Not only was it fun, it was informational. It actually just open their mind to really see the craft and the effort that went into it, which was actually not dissimilar from the original, you know, content, you're still going through script, you're still casting, and so on. So find those examples, find those ways to really, you know, resonate with those individuals that you're trying to, to highlight the visibility of localization and its importance. And I think, again, for the strategist for the for the business side of things, globally, localization is only going to bring you benefit. So it's important for us to continue to push in and highlight how important it is to think about localization ahead of time and stop thinking of it as an operational downstream element. And I'd say that as long as you can continue to focus on that piece, you start bringing more allies, and then those allies will help you continue to elevate localization as a whole.

Marina Ilari 37:16
Yes, thank you, Denise. I think this is the last question we don't have any more time. But I think now we are taking questions from the audience if you have any. In the meantime, I want to thank SmartCAT for having us here today. Thank you, Christy. Thank you, Denise Carrie Mica. For the rest. It's been so fun to talk to you and to be here today. Thank you, moderator to welcome. Hi,

Igor Afanasayev 37:54
hi. Hi. Do you need me to read out the case questions? Or do you see them yourselves? We do have four of them.

Marina Ilari 38:05
Let me see. Oh, yeah, there's a Yeah. Awesome. Great. So you have the power? Well, the first one we have is from God. Gabriella, she says, How do you prepare your career path to become a leader? localization?

Carrie Fischer 38:28
How about joining an organization that promotes women? Yeah. Shameless plug. But I, you know, like I said, it elevated me in a in a way that I did not anticipate. And it was a welcome elevation. So it doesn't have to be women. In localization. Of course, I want you to join women in localization. But you know, there are so many other organizations out there, get to know you get to know other people. And they can help elevate your career, they can mentor you, they can, you know, really, really gets you going. And the more visibility and like, like we said, the more visibility you can bring to your organization about what you do and how important it is. If you're in the right organization that will only lead you on a path upward, in my opinion

Marina Ilari 39:24
now. No, I think joining associations are perfect advice for this, like, look for volunteer opportunities, and these associations and organizations are always looking for volunteers and see how you can contribute volunteering, because we're all volunteers in the association and I think that's a way way. Great way of broadening your network also. And, and yeah, I'm contributing to the awareness of what we do in localization and translation. So it's a win win situation. I mean, it's fun. It's also Yeah, it's fun. Yes,

Nika Allahverdi 40:04
I would add that if you're, if you're in a place in your career where you have an option to kind of go towards localization, but in to any different company or any different project, think of what is it that makes you excited about any kind of project. And if it's an international one, then localization very well might fit in there. I had a friend who was going between companies, but she on her own, she was very interested in our apps that are AR apps. And you can place furniture, it's like a furniture, like placement app. And I asked her, I was like, Hey, dude, do they localize? If this is something that you do in your free time for fun? Maybe you can. That's something that interests you, maybe they are looking to grow and don't know that they need localization help, or a department or anything like that. So if you're looking to become a leader in localization, do think outside the box and maybe find some project or some kind of event or something that's interesting to you, and see how what you can bring into that company?

Marina Ilari 41:18
What, yeah, what a great advice. Okay, the next question we have is, localization becomes difficult when there is no internationalization? Yes, how do you address it? I think Christy, you want to just jump in,

Denisse Kreeger 41:44
I was just going to say that we talked to a lot of startups who, you know, they've seen traffic coming from somewhere or they're, they got investment, they want to grow fast. And they really come to us with zero experience. And you just have to start from the very, very bottom. And we have like checklists, for example, where, you know, it covers everything from like, Yeah, are you internationalized? Like is your tech setup for this to like, why are you doing this? What are your like motivations? That kind of just so just really communication and asking questions. I think that's the only way to start. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, good.

Unknown Speaker 42:29
Yeah, I was gonna say from a from a more high level angle. It's related to what I was mentioning earlier, which is we don't, we can't start thinking about localization, asked, as an afterthought, we have to think about localization at the pre production stages at the planning stages. And this is this goes across, not just for us in this industry, I'm talking about the people that are making those decisions, they need to start thinking about localization early on, because internationalization is such a piece of it. And we need to highlight how costly it is, and how much more effort there goes into it when you have to fix those problems down the line. So this is something that we do a lot in video games, right? We call it the internationalization phase, which is, is, is this going to be in a condition for us to start localization on it are we going to have to go back and recode and redo things because the strings don't don't fit because of translation, etc, etc. There's so many examples we can use here. But I think it is difficult, it's challenging, but it's part of that bigger movement that we have to create. And the movement is localization is not an afterthought, we need to think about it ahead of time, talk to your engineers, talk to you know, whatever product is being done. If we're they're thinking of globalization, then they need to start thinking about these things as early as possible. And that's part of the difficult upstream journey that we sometimes have, but that we have to continue to push for.

Carrie Fischer 44:01
And if you say English is just one of the languages we support, that kind of helps the conversation alone as well. English is just another language. Yeah.

Denisse Kreeger 44:10
And there's only about 5% of the world population that speaks English as a native language. So always think about that. There's way more out there than the English spoken language. I think that's that's I always lead with that with when people say, Oh, this is the only experience that matters. No, it isn't not if you're a global company.

Marina Ilari 44:32
Exactly.

Nika Allahverdi 44:34
You're a global company, you're thinking about hopefully, you're thinking about localization or you're starting to when you are localizing a product and and it's you should keep in mind that that product is going to live in its own universe, right? You you're kind of you're expanding but you're not duplicating you're creating something that will have its own world that it lives in and that that you Keeping that in mind and the early stages will help you envision things that you haven't might have, you might not have just thought about before, because it will have its own place in the world.

Marina Ilari 45:12
Yeah, I love that. And yeah, it ultimately saves you money and time and effort. So it makes sense. I don't know how much time we have. Can we take more questions? Or? I know where?

Igor Afanasayev 45:29
Yeah, I believe so you can take a couple of more questions. Okay, cool.

Marina Ilari 45:33
So we have a question from mighty lady. She says, I'm a translational localization professor at the Federal University of Brazil, somewhere in Brazil, I don't want to mispronounce the name. I have recently published pedagogical approach to Tech game localization focusing on collaborative work, but seems to inherently belong to this segment. Do you consider a good way to teach students besides all technical and linguistic assets manipulation? Thank you for the panel. Thank you for the question. So if we consider, let's see if I understand the question if we consider the she published the pedagogical approach. So the teaching approach, a good way to teach students besides technical and linguistic assets, manipulation? I don't know if I understood the question.

Nika Allahverdi 46:30
So I think she's asking if about the approach to teach game localization? I think it's hard to have a book on game localization or on localization in general, because things are changing so quickly, all the time. So I think a pedagogical approach, if it's something that's published is great, but it's kind of ephemeral, because just because of the speed that things are changing. So if there is a practical approach as well, I think that will be helpful. More hands on approach.

Marina Ilari 47:10
That's a great answer. Nika. Yep. A crane. Next question, from Catherine Bozeman. Org. Catherine also is in clubhouse. I've been following you, Catherine, and I love what you do on your podcast. What more could industry associations like gala and ata do to help women in the localization industry achieve higher level leadership positions in their organizations? For example, business focus, professional development programs, leadership workshops, etc? Yeah, I think that's a great idea, like getting together and getting, like, leadership training, too. And that's a great way to do and just getting together and the mentoring aspect that we were talking before also, what do you have any other thoughts on this?

Denisse Kreeger 48:01
I think the, what we touched on earlier is like that, you know, when there's an open position, maybe it goes through associations like this to try and elevate women that would be suitable, just pointing them out, saying like, you would be good for this. Just giving them that confidence and the network to also ask others, maybe there's someone in the company within those organizations that you could reach out to, like prepping for interviews, things like that. I think those are practical things that an association like that could offer, you know, aside from the elevation work that we do, I think on a personal basis, it gives you a place to reach out to people that might be able to really give you practical tips.

Carrie Fischer 48:53
Great and global community, we're really hoping to provide that kind of support this year. Not only, you know, through events, but with professionals, maybe public speaking, maybe, whatever, how to ask for a raise, you know, just general soft skills that aren't taught anywhere else that could hopefully, you know, also help elevate, but I agree, I mean, other other organizations should have, you know, the content as well. You can learn from everywhere.

Igor Afanasayev 49:37
I think we have more like five more questions. Five more minutes to go over other questions, if you want to pick some. Just as a reminder, there are some technical questions which probably are better to be asked in our community, like using pseudo localization or what are the exact tools that are used? So these are the best candidates for community discussion, but I believe you can you can Like cherrypick some of the questions that are best fit for our panelists here somewhere? Sure.

Marina Ilari 50:07
Yeah, I'm taking a look at the questions now. How do you approach companies that haven't started localization yet? are ones that don't look like they will? In between brackets next door? How do you approach them?

Denisse Kreeger 50:27
Yeah, I mean, we talk about this a lot. And we kind of have a localization, like, Get Started Kit, I suppose. And it's a little bit of what you talked about earlier, Denise's, like just, you know, giving them an understanding of it's not just you send us like, words, and we send it back, right? It doesn't work like that. So you have to really go through the process of, you know, how, how do you? Where do you want to start? Who needs to be involved, you know, it's not enough that like, one person is like doing this, right, they need to a little bit like what we talked about earlier, they need to go and make sure that everyone is on board so that this project takes off? And yeah, so it's really, it is very different from approaching a company that already has a localization team. It's also different from a company that already has multiple locations or places that have already internationalized. You really have to start from from the bottom. And one of the first things is just educating them on how much work this is actually going to be. And, and that it's a it's a commitment. And if you don't start early then and you think like, Oh, we got to this point, and we're just going to start localization, there's going to be a lot of issues that you have to fix, like backwards. So I think that's, that's really, if you're, if you're lucky, you get them very, very early, and you get to talk them through that process and set it up in a great way. But you know, more often than not, we've also seen that other case where they're like, Okay, we're ready to translate, you know, and then

Marina Ilari 52:18
or in a rush, right? Like, it needs to go now because it's ready

Denisse Kreeger 52:22
to launch in a month to happen now. I never Oh, yeah. Exactly. So yeah, so fixing those are trickier. But yeah, every stage of that. Yeah, of course, it's very different. If you are starting from scratch, and hopefully you'll be able to build like a partnership. Yeah, they see you as someone that that's a partner.

Marina Ilari 52:46
Yeah, I think it comes down to what you were saying, Christy, also of understanding why they want to log on who they want to reach exactly, and how they want to go about it and acting as a consultant. With that in mind. Great, um, let's see another question if we have time. Yeah, there are some tools. Oh, Edie, I loved your presentation. She says how can I make a business case for a leadership role or for localization in the company? Director level and up? Autonomy is great, but incomplete without supplemented authority.

Carrie Fischer 53:33
locale solutions I think is their their name. They just came out with a blog, right Tim Urata calls people who manage localization people so managers of Mohm I think it is and it was for it's for them. And it's for these poor people that have to manage people like me who have no idea really what we do we they understand what we do, they don't understand how we do it. And it's it's a matter of educating them. So I literally sent my boss a link to that blog today. Because he's struggling with it. He wants to understand how he can better support me how can we better elevate my position or you know what I do it's a conversation right and if you I'm starting with that blog, and I forwarded the the link literally today and you just you start that discussion practically you go you know, to glass door or whatever and figure out your your tears right for your level and gee, I've been doing this for for two years. I think I've proved myself it's time for me to be you know, elevated in my in my title, my position, my pay, whatever. That would be my advice. That's what I'm doing. Please share the link to the blog. Okay. Oh, yes. Let me find it.

Igor Afanasayev 55:07
Yeah, it's already above in the chat. So people see that. Oh, somebody

Carrie Fischer 55:09
got it. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Managers of localization managers. Yeah. It's mom minding the gaps. It was really good.

Igor Afanasayev 55:18
All right. All right. I think we're out of time with questions. And again, I want to thank you so much for our panelists and for Marina to for organizing and moderating this this panel, I believe it will really help and empower our other women and not only women in organization to aim higher and reach other reached for the for the stars. So thank you so much.