The world is not stopping. It’s just taking a break

Max Morkovkin 00:08
Mario has been the head of localization at the Siena Corporation since 2010. Before joining Siena he worked at SAP as EMBA localization manager, fluent in Spanish, English and German, who will holds an MA in Translation and Interpreting Studies from the University of granite in Spain. He also holds executive certificates in web globalization, management, and global marketing. All Julio comments does on ours, they ask. Sorry, my Spanish is finished. Yeah, I had a couple of Spanish speaking classmates when I was starting in China. So how are you doing?

Julio Leal 00:52
Well, considering the circumstances, I'm not doing that. So how are yourself?

Max Morkovkin 00:56
Yeah, I'm doing good. Good. Yeah. So all of us, I almost in the same circumstances now. So yeah. Okay, so, guys, just reminding you that you have the secure data app to answer your questions. While Julio will be presenting. And feel free to share your opinion and feedback in chat. We're checking this. Thank you very much for staying with us. Hello, now I'm giving the virtual mic to you. Can you share the screen? Okay, thank you. Hello. Yes.

Julio Leal 01:46
Yes, let me share screen. Okay. Okay. Cool. Cool. Okay, thank you for the presentation. And thank you, everyone, for joining in this session today. Thank you, Mark, for organizing such a wonderful event today, I think you just said we have 1000 attendees worldwide. So that's, that's huge. So thanks again for for organizing these. I know we are all live in special days. So I wanted to you know, create a presentation to send some positive vibes to the audience. We don't really know when this is gonna end. But at least there is some positive news out there that we can use for you know, create some positivism. I am based in southern Spain, we are actually about to enter our seventh week confinement until now. So it's tough. I know some countries are also in the same situation. So let's try to make the best of it and stay positive. So the agenda for my presentation is very, very easy. I'm going to talk about some facts and preliminary ideas about the the whole pandemic situation and how I say it, then I want to go into the industries winning or losing in the current situation. And you know, I'm going to be focusing on industries in which the localization industry may be more engaged. Then I'll be talking about you know, the the the situation within CNR how we are managing the whole operational model, how I see the localization industry and things that they could do for you know, weathering the storm. And then some final slides to you know, positive vibes and see a we can create some silver lining across the whole situation. So, I'm fully aware that CNI is not a well known company, probably across the audience. We are a network and systems services and software company. We have 1500 customers across the globe, we have around 7000 employees in more than 35 countries. They when people ask me what we do as a company, the way I usually put it, to make it very simple is you know, when you connect to 4g or 5g networks using your smartphone, you are obviously using your operators network, but the company providing the network, the equipment and infrastructure to make that happen is probably CNN. So obviously, we are a b2b business, we serve large corporations. I want to make this clear, because obviously our localization strategy and our marketing strategy are based on this fact that we are a b2b business serving large enterprises. So, needless to say, we are in, in, in the middle of a huge crisis across all continents across all industries. But I think that as in all previous crisis, we could use this opportunity to, you know, use this crisis to take a step back, and maybe rethink the way that we we do things in order to improve where we should be improved in order to make things different, and, you know, make a fresh new start for many of the things we do in our day to day. So, needless to say, you know, the growth forecast for all economies is, you know, downgrading some economies will suffer most than others. As you can see here, you know, China will only see 1% reduction on in growth these year, the US will also, you know, see small impact, according to the forecast, but other economies like, you know, Italy, Spain, or even Japan will suffer the most just recently, the International Monetary Fund predicted that the, you know, the Italian and Spanish economies will contract by eight to 9%. So that's huge, obviously, for for a national economy. And the same applies to the stock market since the outbreak, we saw huge declines in the prices across all industries. No one seems to know when this is going to end, this crisis in the market also comes with a crisis in the oil market, with prices, just hitting lows that we've never seen before. So you know, it's a crisis of many crisis, and no one really is able to predict when this is going to end. So actually, we've seen a lot of, you know, economies in the media initially saying that the economy will recover in V shape, meaning that you know, we will fall sharply but the Recover will also be extremely quick. Obviously, this is not be the case, and everyone seems to agree that that was very optimistic, then we move into an EU U shaped recovery, meaning, you know, we would have some some time for recovery, and then we everything would be back to normal kind of quickly. Now, everyone seems to agree that that's not the option anymore. The most pessimistic pessimistic said that there would be no recovery at all, it would be just an L shape. Hopefully, they are totally wrong. And now more and more people seem to agree with the idea of, you know, the night Nike shaped recovery, meaning, you know, is it's a huge decline, but things will get back to normal. And the date that, you know, the governments and the companies are managing is the end of 2021 next year, maybe that's very optimistic, considering the circumstances. But we all know that this is temporary. And as soon as we have a vaccine in place, things will you know, change rapidly. Again, as in all crisis, not all industries and sectors are affected alike. Those industries and sectors involving physical contact or travel, do have a high exposure to the whole situation and their businesses will suffer. Other sectors like the metals or technology hardware, they have a moderate exposure and for this industry is probably when you know when factories can get back to normal and the supply chains are normalized, they will see their business going back to normal. We also have sectors with low exposure or positive exposure actually like pharmaceuticals, or telecommunication companies, which they are seeing an increase in their business actually, or the retailers. You know, I'll discuss that a little bit later. But obviously, given that we are all confined indoors, and given that we only have the opportunity to spend our money in house, that means that you know, retailers with a solid presence on the web will make a huge profit out of the situation. We are all confined indoors. So obviously one of our main activities is consuming media. However, the way that we consume media is different across different generations. That's gonna give you four examples here for generation set, which are those aged between 16 and 23 years old, approximately, obviously, they are more interested in you know, online, video gaming, video gaming, that's where they spend most of the time when they have media. In college, in contrast, Generation X, under which I am myself 38 56 years old, we have, we seem to have a more balanced way of consuming media, obviously, broadcast TV and online TV streaming are still huge. But we seem to be more across different channels. Millennials when analyzing the data, to me, it was clear that probably this generation, you know, with ages between 24 and 37, they have the most balanced way of consuming media. And actually, it was funny to see that this is only the only generation with significant usage of podcasts, other generation do not use podcasts or all or they just have very low percentage of usage. And Baby Boomers, those aged between 57 and 64 years old, they are just doing you know, things as they used to be in the past just regular TV typical TV and that's the way the day consume media. Why is this information important because you as a marketer, or as a local HMC professional now that you know that you're all your audience is indoors, you know, you need to know which channels to use to target to target your audience. So, obviously, depending on the age or generation your target audience belongs to, you will have to use one channel or others. So, I mean, this tool and this information for marketers, is extremely relevant and important. We are confine, we still can spend our money on some things, but out here we can see how people are spending their money these days. So obviously, all activities related to travel like airlines, going to the movies or buying fitness opera out, that's gone, people are just spending their money on food supermarket as they go to the grocery store, they do a lot of video streaming, they play online with friends and family etc. So, obviously, we have two different spectrums of how people are spending their their money. In this graphic, you can see which items or which elements are being are on the rise in the E commerce in the E commerce sector, and which products are you know, in decline, so huge increase of globes or you know, all items related to food, again, the toilet paper seems to be on the rise again, almost 200% of toilet paper sales. And in contrast, unfortunately, you know, all items related to travel like luggage or briefcases, or, you know, sport at rail on decline for obvious reasons. And the truth is that we are in a shifting environment, who would have said, now that, you know, people demonise in the plastic sector to three months ago, because they were destroying the planet, everyone was against him. And now two, three months later, they are now kind of the saviors of the world, given that many health products and equipment is, you know, is made out of plastic. So this is all changing very rapidly. And industries like that were very healthy months ago are now you know, on the opposite side of the spectrum. And this can happen on any sector. Just let's look for instance, at the commercial real estate, we work actually solid company, I think they were about to go public. Last year. They are commercial real estate, they they rent office space to companies. But now that given that we companies are moving all their employees to work from home, we've seen kind of chain of paradigms and looks like the way that we interact with employees now is no longer in the office. It's using online conferencing tools. And as a result of that, we all know the the increase that we've seen in the in the in the stock price for companies like zoom, as you can see here in the chart, price almost doubled since the since the outbreak. So this you know, this brings up another question Is this the end of office work as we know it? I'm aware that many companies were very reluctant to let people not let their employees work from home. However, now more and more companies are seeing that maybe it was not such an such a bad idea. You know, and maybe after you know, all these security measures are lifted, maybe more companies will embrace home office, which will reduce you know, the demand for office space. And who knows, maybe that's a sector totally in decline. Or maybe we will use Office differently. So there are So many open questions out there based on, you know, the way that we are interacting now. You know, I see no crisis, we have big losers and big winners. As I said earlier in my presentation, I want to focus in on certain industries and industries in which the localization industry is more engaged or maybe more exposed. And I think that the first sector that comes to mind is the travel industry. Unfortunately, this industry has been hit really hard. You know, we have more than 100 countries around the world, we travel restrictions to their nationals, you cannot go in or out of the country. And no one really knows when this is gonna end, we see government's postponing the quarantine status, you know, over and over again. And no one really knows when, you know, we will be able to receive travel, as a consequence of that the number of daily flights has dramatically dropped almost half available here in a huge percentage. And airlines are in serious trouble. We all know that most airplanes are parked in air in airports, no one really knows when you know, they will be able to resume flights. Just yesterday, before yesterday on the media they were discussing if you know if we will be seeing trouble, will that be with security measures meaning that we will need to sell or we will need to reduce the capacity of the airplanes by 60%. Obviously, that will imply that, you know, if the airlines need to review seats by 60%, maybe the ticket prices will you know, go up 60% Because obviously that's not sustainable from the economic point of view. So a lot of question marks in the travel industry. And not only airlines, many associated companies and many companies associated with the with the industry like booking.com or Tripadvisors are also seen declines in in the users in the users they have on the web or on their apps. Both cases, you can see 40% Almost 50% And obviously we don't know when people will will still will be able to travel again. And there are so many uncertainties out there that obviously no one is really making plans for the near future. Another industry in the crisis we read in the news every day is the automotive industry factories are stopped, the supply chain is in, you know is in suffering a lot of challenges. I think that this week, some German factories have reopen their supply chain, not all of them because you know, they don't have still old materials. And even you know, if they are able to resume production for in their factories. No one really knows what the demand for those cars will be we are entering a full recession globally. So obviously buying a new car is not something that will be on top of you know, of the consumers when this is all over, they will have more other priorities. That will mean maybe more layoffs for the automotive industry, no one really knows. Some research, recent research for the automotive sector even in the best case scenario, meaning that we will have a fast recovery economies like China will suffer dramatically from these supply chains shortage in for materials in the cars. But in order to have winners, sorry, we have to have losers, we have to have winners. So we already discussed the rise of soul as a preferred application for conferencing with with colleagues or with family or with friends. Most of us who work from home and also have kids. They also know you know, Google Classroom, you know, it's a way to teach kids remotely you know, all these apps, meaning online streaming are on the rise because that's the way that people have to interact with with peers. I was discussing earlier the rise of the E commerce in in general across all regions. And here I just want to put a very quick sample of Italy which is probably the the so far unfortunately the country that has been hit the hardest by the pandemic. This SOS the the ecommerce sales in Italy from the outbreak team very recent days. And actually I think that Italy went into lockdown on the 21st of May I'm March. And you can see that very same day the sales of E commerce, the sales in the E commerce sector almost double. Obviously, they have some ups and downs. But there is an upward trend in in the E commerce. This means that solid businesses with a solid localization strategy with solid websites might be in a better position to weather the storm and be able to capture many of these sales in the E commerce sector. I think that the localization industry eats in a in a good situation to serve the winners of the situation. We know that Netflix and HBO they are adding new users every month, I think Netflix announced in the recent recent press release that they have added 16 New 16 million new users worldwide. That's huge. HBO the same, they are adding new content, new series new films that obviously they need to be translated. As a result of that, we also are aware of the fact that you know, due to the huge demand in traffic, Netflix was pressed to reduce the quality of their streaming services by 25%. In order not to collapse the internet in Europe, and also in Spain. I know some cuts, some countries have a dubbing culture for failing some serious because of the situation or the lockdown situation in Spain, many series and films were were only offered in a subtitled version, given that the dubbing studios were totally locked down and the dubbing professionals could not do their duties. So we see you know a little bit of both. Situation here's in one of my previous lives, we saw the the influence on how the younger generations are using online gaming big platforms like Twitch for online gaming, they are they are seeing weekly increases of 17% in in web traffic, the same for one of their main competitors mixture weekly increases of 90%. So we all are fully aware that the gaming industry is huge for localization. So we are seeing a huge increase in these industries. And obviously this because this could mean a huge increase for the for those localization companies serving this industry. Now I want to quickly talk about how we at Siena, were able to cope with the whole situation. Since you know the confinement. Luckily enough at Siena, a huge percentage of employees work from home. And the whole setup that we have, it's fully remote. So in my team, for instance, we have been remote working remotely since day one. So obviously, we have not seen any disruption of service or we have not seen any changes in the way we operate since the outbreak. And the localization strategy is based on two main pillars, we have a very good solid set of tools. And by tools, I mean a content management system serving the entire organization, the localization team is involved in the whole process. So we know all the content that is being produced that it's coming from the different teams, we are kept in the loop. So we know what content is going to be landing in our in our supply in our in our operations. And well in advance so we can prepare. We also have a translation management system fully connected to the CMS. So once things are fully developed, and all the content is ready to be used, we know what languages we need to use, we need to translate into and that goes into that translation management system. And then my team takes it from there. We also use analytics tools. Obviously, you can have, you know, very good tools out there. But if you don't know the results of your strategy, you don't really know if you are doing well or not. So we use these analytic tools to change things to maybe make some tweaks to our strategy along the way. Maybe we can add content will remove content, we add more languages will reduce languages depending on what the data are telling us. But obviously behind good tools we need to have a good set of people, right so without them there's no way that the good tools can work. So at Siena we have a dedicated team of resources fully dedicated to localization. We work We've SLPs and mlvs. Depending on the language, the type of content, etc, we do not stick to, you know, one single thing, just because we we've seen that, you know, some circumstances may be better for one approach and one for others. We work with professional agencies to help us with, I don't know, multimedia content elearning desktop publishing, so a full array of services are there. And to me what it is probably the most important pillar here is the freelancers. We've been using freelancers since day one since day one. I'm a full supporter or the freelance of the Freelancers I think they do, they do a great job, especially at Siena, they are responsible for the quality of all our translations, they are considered part of the company. And I think that having a good set of freelancers helps everything that's work, because you can have very good content management system, you can have very good agencies. But if you know, you don't have good linguist behind all that nothing really works. So I think that's critical. And now, my final slides are about you know, to send some positive vibes out there, Call it coincidence or not. But we all know that some governments managed to heal the situation better than others. And as I said, maybe it's a coincidence, maybe it's not, but the government's which have been proven to manage the whole situation way better, are headed by women. So hoping this is a change in paradigm. And we can see more women in the top positions of government, maybe for the next pandemic, especially for New Zealand and Taiwan, I think those were clear examples of that situation. Another silver lining, you know, more positive news. Maybe this is the newest Star for a greener world. The European Green deal was signed last year, with very, you know, optimistic ideas of how we should transition to the greener economy. But given that we are now in the middle of this pandemic, politician from you know, from all different parties, intellectuals, they are pushing the European institutions to, to use, you know, the, this Green Deal as the most significant way of, you know, exiting the the situation we have right now. So maybe we are expecting to see a lot of money being invested in green energies, green mobility, who knows, maybe this is a sector for the future. I'm hoping it is actually we've all seen the news, we've all seen the the images, the, you know, the significant reduction of pollution levels, across major cities in the world, I think the city of Milan is one of the most shocking examples. And I think that just today or the day before, just today, the city of Milan announced that once this is all over, they're going to be announcing greener policies for mobility, they are not expecting the cities to be so being so crowded, we've all seen the news of Venice, the water is totally clean. So that's why I'm staying positive. We are seeing the the result of you know, not the contaminate the pollution that we are creating to the world and maybe we are started using things differently. So don't lose hope as this lady here. I think that it's important that we keep spirits up, and and that we stay positive for the future. Thank you. And thank you so much.

Max Morkovkin 28:55
Very good timing. Julio. Thank you. Thank you very much. And cue this from female attendees of ours. It was such an unexpected piece of information. Thank you. I haven't, you know, look at these from this angle. But yeah, you know, I heard from some people that patriarchy world will be replaced by a matriarchal world soon, so maybe it's one of the signs. Who knows?

Julio Leal 29:23
Yeah, who knows, let's say, I mean, I'm not gonna say that, you know, it should be just all women. But you know, I think we should be supporting that idea. And they are proven to be way better than we might at least in this situation. But at

Max Morkovkin 29:37
least we have something to learn, right? Yes. Okay. So we have questions from our attendees. Let's start with this. And, yeah. We have one question from our YouTube. Visitors. So, Julio, do you think AI technology will end the translation industry? If yes, when what are your recommendations to translators editors or LSP managers are working in the industry?

Julio Leal 30:09
Well, that's a very good idea. I mean, I don't think we will ever replace human translators. And they will always be work for human translators. It's true that artificial intelligence is huge, they are becoming smarter and smarter every day. Obviously, I don't have a date, when, you know, there could be a major outbreak of artificial intelligence. But we are seeing that I'm I totally supported off, you noticed, machine translation, for instance, just because we have so much content out there that we need just rapidly translated, that we need these kinds of technologies to deal with a huge amount of content that we have. But from my perspective, at least I 80% of my work is marketing. And, honestly, there's no way that I can give marketing content to a machine, not at least not right now. Because things wouldn't work. The same. I understand that, you know, content, like documentation, or, you know, help, can be, can be better can benefit from this kind of technology. But I don't think that all different types of content are a good fit for this type of technology. So that's my view, at least on this.

Max Morkovkin 31:25
Yeah, so all of us now producing content. And the volumes are growing and growing. So we will definitely need more people to be involved into translation. Even some people now I know that in touristic industry, they are now translating posts on Instagram and Facebook, and also on Twitter. So have people to translate tweets, imagine how machine will translate tweets of Trump. Oh, yeah.

Julio Leal 31:55
So yeah, I think that I think there will be enough space for for everyone for technologies and humans. And as I said, I'm a big supporter of freelance human translators. And, and I will keep it that way, at least for now.

Max Morkovkin 32:08
Cool. So let's take a look at the second question. What are the main things to consider when looking for freelance translators?

Julio Leal 32:18
Oh, that's, that's a good question. Okay, this is a conversation that I had with you know, many colleagues and friends in the industry. One of the things that I look into when I'm looking for freelancers is if they are specialized or not. In my opinion, I don't think that it helps that you serve yourself as a translator in a good array of topics, okay, you cannot be good at one and extremely good at others, I think that you need to specialize on certain certain fields, in order to be you know, good as a translator in that field. On the other hand, I understand that many translators tell me that, hey, if you just if I just specialize in this field, I may be losing jobs, or it will be very hard for me to ramp up and get customers. Yeah, that's true. That's the other side of the equation. But I think that once you specialize in one field, I think that you will have, you know, a solid portfolio of customers separate for that industry. All my freelancers have been working in the team for almost 10 years. And believe that this is why they call honestly, this the lawyer what the fact because when you actually go to a lawyer, you don't go to enter the firm and say, Hey, lawyer, what's your best rate for serving my case? No, you are, you're actually asked for the rate. To me the same I think we should just treat translators as other professionals in other industries and say, Hey, what's your rate, respect those rates? And honestly, a well paid translator will always be fully engaged with your company. So I think that's the best way to to hire translators. Obviously, we see you know, huge demand for reducing price etc. But I think that for me as a marketer, and a localizer, having good translators is way more important than producing cars at this point, because translating cheap for marketing and not selling but saving money just for the sake of it doesn't make any sense. So I think that for translators specializing in various specific fields might benefit more than just having a full array of, of fields of for translation.

Max Morkovkin 34:34
Thank you for such a detailed answer. And we have another one. What analytics tools do you use and what for?

Julio Leal 34:46
For marketing, we use well known tools in the industry in order to analyze the visitors we have, where they go when they go to our websites if our emails are open or not. If they They click on the CTA is that we have that we have on our emails. So we also have do a B testing, meaning that we can send the same email with two different offers just to see which offer is working better than other. So obviously, translating and not analyzing the data of those translations will not make you better. Okay. So I think that every time that you get budget for translation, you are, you're supposed to make very good use of that translation budget. And I think that, you know, by analyzing the data, it makes you a good, you know, it makes you better in terms of how you use your, your budget for translation. So I think that I think that those tools are well known for for everyone. But I think that everyone knows what I'm talking about.

Max Morkovkin 35:51
Great. So we have more questions, guys, we still have time. So you can write your questions here. How do you manage project communication with multiple freelancers, especially in multilingual projects,

Julio Leal 36:07
through the translation management system, so once the content can be I don't know, marketing could be multimedia, it can be a video, once that content is completed in English that moves into a translation management system. And from that point onwards, it's distributed across the different actors in the in the, in the workflow. So we have translators, we have translation agencies, we have vendors doing different stuff, and everything is centralized through the translation management system. And all the communications are within the system. In 10 years, I think we've had to translation management systems, just because obviously, not all TMS might be a good fit for you. So obviously, it's also very important that you make sure that the capacities and the requirements in your localization team can add that can you know, can be adapted in that TMS. And I don't think there is a one size fits all for TMS. So it's very important that you scrutinize very well, what kind of TMS Are you ready to onboard?

Max Morkovkin 37:18
Okay. We have, yeah, everybody is saying thank you. Very well structured and insightful presentation. Hello, thank you very much for that. Thank you. And, yeah, a couple of more questions. Do you recall the language industry would be a worth industry to invest in the next five years? And why?

Julio Leal 37:42
Okay, can you say that again?

Max Morkovkin 37:44
Do you recall the language industry would be a worse industry to invest in the next five years? And why?

Julio Leal 37:50
Yes, I totally I totally support that idea. There will always be content either from one industry or another, there will always be content and some industries may die or some industry may suffer from the whole situation, but we are seeing other industry just, you know, rise in because of the situation, I think there is always opportunity. And in the localization industry, it's able to quickly identify those industries, there is always room for investment in the localization industry. So I think that fortunately for us, the localization industry is a good position. Obviously now, it's no one really knows. We've received many surveys lately from from research firms, just to see how we are going, we are planning to use our budget along the year now with all these uncertainties. And honestly, we don't really know how we're going to manage the situation until we have a clearer idea of you know, when the confinement will end when we'll be able to travel. But I think that given that we know that once we have a vaccine in place, this will pretty much over I think this this gives us a temporary horizon on you know, on on the planning for our budget, so totally, yes, I think it's worth investing now and in five years time.

Max Morkovkin 39:13
Cool. So once again, thank you very much. It was an amazing presentation made by Julio Lal, and thank you for the detailed answers. I hope that our attendees are more than satisfied. We should success and yeah, keep keep in touch and stay tuned with our conference. We have more speakers to come.

Julio Leal 39:37
Okay, thank you for hosting me. You're welcome.