Uncomfortable Questions to Localization Providers

Bryan Montpetit 00:04
Coming up next, we're going to stay within the California State. They're going a little bit north to talk to one of my favorite people. Igor. Hey, man, how you doing?

Igor Afanasayev 00:14
Oh, nice to see again, Ryan. Oh, yeah. And

Bryan Montpetit 00:17
you? I'm sure one. Okay, thanks. So Igor is going to basically ask the questions that, you know, those uncomfortable questions that that localization providers tend not to ask. So I think that I'm going to, because we're going over time, I'm not going to sit around, I'm going to let you jump right into it. And you know how it works. I'll jump back in when we have q&a.

Igor Afanasayev 00:38
Okay, let you know, when you can see the screen,

Bryan Montpetit 00:42
I can see it perfectly.

Igor Afanasayev 00:44
Okay, so yeah, I'm eager to find out, see if I'm a Senior Product Manager at SmartCAT. And today, we have a little bit of controversial topic, which is uncomfortable questions to position technology providers, and what that actually means. So, as you know, it is a really frustrating task to select the best localization technology or translation management system. There are so many parameters, futures, nuances, and you know, to keep in mind, and as you speak to salespeople, it's really hard to interpret their answers correctly. So, if you're not shopping for a TMS solution, specifically, but rather are looking for a localization provider, they often come up with their own technology. And sometimes they don't want to share what they're using and say that, well, you don't need to know how the sausage is made, we will do it right for you. But this is that lack of transparency that leads to that breaks trust, and then ultimately leads you and forces buyers to look at other solutions. So there are very many things to consider when you're choosing ATMs, it could be different pricing, some automation, what connectors, they have some reporting and analytics, and so on. So how do you do that? And before you even start shopping around for ATMs, usually what you want to do is to define your goal. This will allow you to frame your question and your questions and understand what to ask about, and what are the most important things to ask about. So here are just a few examples that usually come up with in conversations between clients and TMS providers. How do I reduce my translation costs? Or how do I improve the turnaround time for a gel localization that I'm planning to have? How do I improve the translation quality, and increase process transparency, or I as localization manager want to be as efficient on your platform as possible. And if you take those marks, and then you start to think what it means to achieve those goals, you will start to narrow down your questions to the ones that really matter. For example, if you are looking to reduce your costs, then probably you will shift your conversation towards using machine translation, machine translation, post editing, working with multiple suppliers ability to see like the actual spendings, and so on. If you want to improve your turnaround time, then you will naturally think about how to automate your processes, how to provide more context and how to do better collaboration and messaging between us localization manager and for example, content providers on one side, your internal stakeholders, and linguist on the other side. If you want to improve your quality, again, it will be topics of measuring quality, what QA checks, does the what are the linguistic tools that the platform provides glossaries placeholders you know, all that stuff. So it really helps to understand what you're actually after, and then go back to to the supplier. And one of the tricky things is that a tricky thing is that not all, not all of us are experts in localization and creating optimal localization workflows and processes. And we're not experts in TMS solutions, either. So this is why it's important to actually share the goals and pinpoints with the provider. So this, again, allows you to have a much better understanding of what the platform provides. And then those open questions give you really valuable input and insights. So you actually get some real good advice for free. But here's one trick in addition to sharing your goals, your objectives, your pain points, you also want to provide some reasonable constraints and it could be some timeframes or certain budget, because if you do not provide that Basically, you can be sold pretty much anything, right? If you can wait, then it salesperson and they tell to oversell you some features and if you are asking about specific features, they will say, Okay, this is coming or this is actually something that we can implement for you real quick. But if you are framing your questions in a way that you provide time budget or, or monetary budget, then you can see how your discussion becomes more, you know, like down to earth more real, and you will see what the platform actually provides. So, you want to say that I want to achieve this specific goal within certain number of like, weeks or months, and how do I do that with your platform, or you share what you will, I'm sorry, what your budget are, and then the goal and again, you want to see how they will respond, and then carefully, remember about those answers, because they provide really valuable insight. So, now that you define your goals, you can focus on things that will really matter to you. If you want to increase your efficiency, you want to think about, you know, actions that you will be performing, performing over and over again during your daily, like management routines, project creation, sending tasks, to translators, notifying internal customers about completed projects, uploading downloading files, etc. So write them down. But instead of just asking a salesperson on the other end, whether they support this feature or not. And how do you do that? Try to measure that, how many steps does it take for me to create a project? How much time does it take for me to even open the file in the editor, some times, like online solutions can be real slow. And you cannot see that in the demo, and it will look really smooth. But those small things add up. And then suddenly, you'll realize that you cannot tolerate some of those small things any longer. Anytime you're asking about specific questions about a specific feature, or approach or process, ask if there's a way to automate that, again, it will be a great litmus test on how advanced this technology provider is, what they think about automation and how they approach that. If you're after improving quality, there are two factors to think about and to ask for. First, its context. Anything, developer comments from resource files, or screenshots, any kind of visual context, document previews is something that you want to provide to a technology provider. But here's the thing, even if you provide this context, it doesn't mean that the actual translator who will be doing your job, we'll see that and this is what you want to ask from the from the technology provider. Because if you are shopping for a TMS and it looks good, it looks really sleek and simple in terms of you know, the way you work as localization manager, it doesn't mean that it looks as good for the translator. Translators are forced to work within that tool. And sometimes actually, they don't work in that particular TMS at all. So this is the question to ask, do translators actually work within that platform and what they will see when they will be translating your content. Some times you show for a TMS, again, it looks good, you sign a contract, you invite your localization provider to work within this TMS. But what happens next is they will download things for translation in their system. And this is where translators will work. And then they will upload the results. Again, they will not tell you that, or will be reluctant to tell you that. But every step where you export strings for translation into another system can reduce the context, you upload the screenshot, but the translator doesn't see that you upload some comments, but it's awkward for them to see that in their system. So you always want to see how the actual supplier will see will see your content in which context is provided. When it comes to connectors, and this is again, sometimes a very interesting topic because when you're choosing your translation management system, you usually try to compare whether a specific system supports those types of like External Content System CMS tools, like learning, management systems and so on. So you just want to have a checklist whether like particularly CMS supports this, this and this, but it when it comes to connectors, sometimes the process of working with them is really really Manual, you can have a fully automated system where, which integrates with your, for example, Git repository for your developers to upload strings and download strings and everything looks really automated and smooth. But when it comes to connectors, usually it's very, it's a very manual process. So you want to really keep attention on that. And as you have the demo of this process, ask provider do I have to press that button to send in you a new document for translation over and over again? Can I automate that. So this is this is really important if you are planning to scale up your processes, and want to do things faster. Another interesting test were connectors and like processes around them really break is when you want to send some last minute changes for translation. So what usually happens is that you select a specific document or set of documents, send it over for translation, and then work starts to happen on the TMS side. But then suddenly, there's a last minute change in a document. And then this process breaks, you have to communicate something somehow to like on the TMS side that this project should be cancelled, or you need to wait for it to be completed before you can send over a new version. And this, this really becomes a nightmare. So always try to discuss those edge cases and see how a particular connector works in those cases, because this is where you will be wasting the most time on. Another interesting technology that is really, that looks really shining in the demos is proxy based website localization. And it can be a really good and you know, a proper technology in certain cases. But there are serious technical limitations to that, that you need to be aware of. So first question that you want to ask is plain, what are the technical limitations of this technology, and you want to absorb all those answers? If you're being told that there are no problems with that and who look in work completely smoothly, then the person is either not, you know, technically savvy and do not does not understand that technology, or they're just trying to hide something from you. So that would be a red flag. And you can go into more like specific details about that. And ask what happens with, like dynamic websites, when some content appears on a page only as a sequence of iterations, interactions of the user within that page? So how do you? How do you make sure that everything is translated? Because what usually happens with those technologies is that you will end up having lots of untranslated or semi translated pages where source content, for example, in English is mixed with the partially translated content in other language. So how do you deal with that? It can be good for support materials, something of like less importance of less visibility, when it comes to your marketing website, you want to make sure that this technology can actually provide you a good answer for those technologies, also, some time, have a tendency of not discovering the content unless someone visits the page. So what happens is that when you are publishing the page, you need to publish it first in one language, then visit that page, and then an external connector that like this proxy based solution can determine that this is a new page. And in that time, it only needs to be sent for translation, but then it will take some time till the translations get back, especially if you're not using like machine translation and have some humans to look at the strings. So you will end up being a manual crawler for this process, trying to always visit the new pages that you that you want to start localizing in the first place. So these are the questions that you want to ask from the provider. And when you are shopping for a solution, which includes that proxy based website localization, really get down into technical details and understand how your life with that solution will be. Another topic and this is a favorite of mine is continuous localization. Well, continuous localization is a buzzword nowadays. Sometimes clients come to technology providers and ask for continuous localization. Without quite understanding what this is. Sometimes, they are being sold continuous localization and again, people who are selling that can mean pretty much anything by this term. So first of all, just define what the continuous what contents localization means for you, and for technology provider. And the way they will respond will make you will basically allow you to align and make sure that you're talking about the same thing. So another question that you can that you can use to kind of like narrow down the response is how often exactly a consent strings for translation? And sometimes you will, you will get an answer that will recommend us to do this daily or like couple times a week, et cetera. And you can ask, can you do this, like every five minutes, every minute? And if the answer will be no, or why would you want to do that this means that technology by itself is not ready. So something in this process in the technology is broken, that it doesn't allow you to scale. Now, you may not need to do this like that often. And you may think, like, Okay, once a day is fine for me, but you want to understand the technology behind it, and understand how you will be able to scale it when you actually need it. Now, pricing, pricing is a complicated topic. And sometimes it's meant to be complicated. There are different aspects and different limitations that come into different subscription tiers that you need to be aware of. And by understanding what are the limitations, you can also understand how it will affect your day to day use of the platform. For example, some platforms can say that they have limited number of seats, and but the number of seats in your pricing package can be acceptable or you think is generous enough to support your needs now, or like in a few months, or even a year. But then, if you're still limited on the number of seats, you cannot invite everyone on the platform, which means that you have limited your ways to collaborate efficiently within the platform. And for example, you cannot easily invite any internal stakeholder into the platform to see the progress of like translation tasks. So then it means that you need to focus on the reporting capabilities of those platforms and understand what the offer but sometimes advanced reporting and analytics is only a part of the higher subscription tier. Also limiting the number of like usually limiting the number of words is another way to kind of differentiate between those, those pricing tiers. And, again, you can see that like your monthly volume of translation is low enough, and you know, you're well under this limit. But limiting the number of words that can be exposed on the platform significantly reduces your ability to do continuous localization, to do efficient, like machine translation, post editing, where you can keep every single string that is available for translation on the platform. But then select specific parts of your projects and then do selective post editing. So you don't want to think about your monthly throughput. You want to see the how much of the what is the entirety of your content? Out looks like what is the what is the size etc? and factor this in when trying to see the what is the subscription tier that is appropriate for you. And then you can ask direct questions, what limits do you think we will hit first, because again, sometimes you can be sold on unlimited something. But then there is a certain other feature that is highly limited and the you will hit that. And we'll never be able to use the unlimited features that are being pushed to you. Then there are other hidden costs that you need to consider. And this is something that you can share. And you can directly ask from your provider. What would be the cost of migration and ownership of this technology? They can say that they're an open platform, they allow you to integrate and do everything, but well, who will be doing those integrations? Who will be maintaining those? And how often you will need to do that. So engineering, usually and management costs are usually higher, as compared to just translations. And sometimes people have translation budgets, but they do not factor in other factors like how much time will it take or how many engineers will it take to actually maintain all the integrations in good shape? And then a question that nobody wants to hear is what happens if we decide to break up with you? Can we export all the content, what it will take for us to migrate over from your platform to something else? So this allows you to understand how open the platform is about your data and whether you will be having large costs of migration from this platform into another one. So to sum it up, the first thing you want to do is to step away from thinking about specific features that you want to see on the platform, try to build it with open minded, try to define your goals, and then share them with your providers. So they can provide you the best options as they think. And ultimately, if you're paying for a subscription, that you want to utilize all the tools, all the power that the specific technology can provide, if you're thinking about certain features, you might end up using 10 20%, or for the functionality that you are paying for. But if you are coming with goals, and see what the provider can offer, and what is the optimal workflow in their mind, then you can see how to actually leverage that technology. As I mentioned before, you want to give time and budget constraints. And play around with those when you're talking about approaches to localization. First, you can say you just want to, you want to achieve that goal. But then what happens if we want to achieve that goal within a month, or you can say, I want to achieve that goal, without any budget limitations, but what happens if I have a strict budget to work on this specific thing. So with that, you will be playing around with different like input parameters, and we'll see how the responses will change. And again, it will allow you to understand the platform better. As this is something that I mentioned quite a few times now. But as always ask open ended questions because open ended questions give you much better insights. And after shopping around for different TMS and working with multiple people, you will be a better person in terms of like a better localization manager, you will better understand the approaches to localization, the technologies and how to how to leverage them. And now, whenever you're talking about specific features, try to measure them dive deeper and see how many steps will it take for you to get from point A to point B, because this is ultimately that will matter in the long run as you will be doing things over and over again. So that concludes my presentation. And by the way, today, I want to share that I will be giving that book for you, which is humorous, seriously. And I bet Brian will love that work as well. Because that's something that he works and lives by. So, welcome.

Bryan Montpetit 22:32
Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Er, that was, that was fantastic. And as I suspected, there are questions for you. A lot of a lot of questions, I think you'll be able to provide some great insight to and if we move to the first one, I think this one has the most up votes. So question about an uncomfortable question. How do I approach a localization provider if I have concerns regarding their ethical policy, the rates they provide versus the salary they pay? Or I assume that the rates they pay to external providers, if it's the case,

Igor Afanasayev 23:08
sort of creepy that he just loves the first bit?

Bryan Montpetit 23:11
No problem, a question about uncomfortable. A question about an uncomfortable question. How do I approach a localization provider, if I have concerns regarding their ethical policy example, the promo they provide versus the salary they pay?

Igor Afanasayev 23:27
That's really a big one, I don't think you will ever get an honest answer to that. Right. So my question, my answer would be, basically to pick the technology that allows you to control that, for example, like machine translation, like give it giving, maybe it's not exact answer to this particular one, but sometimes a provider can say that they will be not using machine translation, but they will. And everybody does, and you never know that. So, if you are using a localization provider as a black box, you can never know what they will be doing. And no matter how, how many uncomfortable questions you will be asking from them, you will never get a clearer picture. So if they work within your platform, where you have some measurable information on how people are working, or if you can pick your providers in a more you know, like fluid way This allows you to compare to compare the you know, the the money you pay and the quality that comes from those providers, and then you can get some insights from that.

Bryan Montpetit 24:41
Great, thank you very much. Just to let you know that I'm always transparent when people ask me questions like that, just just just for the record.

Igor Afanasayev 24:52
And this This is where humor comes to mind. They they they feel that you're honest with them.

Bryan Montpetit 25:00
So next question, what is the best way to do an ROI return on investment analysis of a TMS tool, internal work or via an outside consultant?

Igor Afanasayev 25:11
Well, again, if you have a budget for an outside consultant, I would say that it would be the best option to get get some more input from multiple sources. But ROI is a topic of another conference, not even another discussion, right? And it's always an elusive thing to actually, you know, get a definite answer to my point, my point is that you want to consider multiple things. And it's not only about the translation, so ROI of your localization means that you want to factor in like the salaries of the entire localization team licenses for the TMS platform, and then the translation prices. And translation can be sometimes a really small factor, if you try to get this holistic picture. So having a platform that allows you to get proper insight on the money you spent on that platform, is one of the key steps. And this is something that you're usually seeking from technology, but then try to zoom out a little bit. And then in addition to that, try to see how much time you spent on this platform, who is working with the platform, how much basically this, this will give you the the entire picture.

Bryan Montpetit 26:29
Great, great advice. Great insight. Thank you for that. Another question. Can you provide example circumstances of when continuous localization is used?

Igor Afanasayev 26:39
When it's used? Well, it can be used pretty much anywhere, it's used rarely. And sometimes people who say next talk about continued localization do not actually use that. So continuous localization is something that usually comes when when you're trying to localize software, because this means tight content producing cycle and like product release cycles. And you want to, to be an integral part of that. So continuous localization is something that happens in parallel with the development and it's not tied to release cycle. If you have release cycle every two weeks, it doesn't mean that you want to do every two weeks, localization to localization every two weeks on a schedule, because it doesn't make a continuous. But if you can do this, every, every hour, within those two week release cycles, and before the release, you already have everything fully translated. And quality assurance was done on multiple languages, then you have this continuous localization. And this goes back to my slides about connectors, you almost never get continuous localization with connectors. So if you want to have a like pseudo continuous localization that you use, you have to have a person that will continuously press some button. And I guess that's something that you want to avoid.

Bryan Montpetit 27:57
Great, thank you for that. Next question is, what do you think the most frequently overlooked aspects by company investing into a new TMS?

Igor Afanasayev 28:08
I would say, again, context, I would say is the topic that usually comes well, people are always looking at improving the quality, but they do not understand how to achieve that. Right. And they do not know, what are the specific features that need to be implemented in order to provide enough context for translators. And again, sometimes they pick the right TMS, but when the actual translator works offline or outside of that solution, this is what they do not know about. And they do not understand they never look at how the translator sees the like the UI because the translation management system is sold not to translators, it's sold to localization managers. So you have a shiny picture on one side and pre Cana it can be pretty ugly on the other side. So look at what translators see. And you will get much better insight on whether they can provide you quality, quality output.

Bryan Montpetit 29:11
Great. So the 360s spec, that's wonderful. Another question coming in. Constantine asked which technology our industry needs currently. And if it's not there, if you had 12 months, for example, what would you develop? Okay, well, you stayed here. Yes.

Igor Afanasayev 29:30
The lots of there are lots of things that, you know, that I believe are interesting to explore. And it makes sense, right? First of all, the synergy between content creation and localization. Media localization, immediate localization is a huge thing. Especially with you know, like with COVID with distance learning with, like heavy like If towards the words reached media, you want to be able to localize subtitles or like have nice pipelines for that, where localization is built in. So I would say like synergy between content creation in various aspects and in localization.

Bryan Montpetit 30:17
Great. What are the other questions? This one? I'm not sure if they're asking you or, or with respect to SmartCAT. But how much do you invest in localization?

Igor Afanasayev 30:28
How much? Yeah, yeah, I'm actually left luxation manager. But I develop a TMS and we use our TMS to localize our TMS. So it's kind of like a medical question. What what I do specifically is, as a person who is in charge of automation, basically, in understanding how our platform addresses the automation needs of our customers, though technology buyers, I invest my personal time to actually make sure that everything is automated and continuous. But I can tell you about numbers.

Bryan Montpetit 31:04
Perfect. That's a very honest answer. I appreciate that. Do you think you can go a bit more into detail with respect to the best localization workflow in your opinion?

Igor Afanasayev 31:16
For me, the best localization workflow is continuous localization for everything and not about only about, like software strings, like product localization, but also about marketing. I believe that it's that we, as an industry are able to gather, we're not there yet. But it's something that we try to internally like preach, when it comes to localizing our internal content being marketing, and product, and this is what we're trying to build with our platform.

Bryan Montpetit 31:48
Okay, do you think you can elaborate, perhaps on the marketing aspect on how to ensure continuous localization on marketing side? Because I think we're all clear on the on the software side, right? Like, it makes sense. But on the marketing side, just a little bit.

Igor Afanasayev 32:04
Yeah. So usual approach is that you, you go to CMS, for example, right, and you want to translate a particular like topic or page, and you select that or a bunch of pages, and you send them over for translation. And this becomes a like manual, like isolated project or translation tasks. And then you need to wait for it to be completed and then import things back and then click publish the changes. So the continuous localization, for marking content, the way you see that is that you have a way to automatically like whenever you're done, and like Mark something is not draft, basically something that is ready for production, for republishing, or for localization, this is where it automatically gets published on the translation management system side. And all the translations that are happening are automatically integrated back into your CMS. So you can automatically deploy those changes as needed. So that's, that's my ideal situation where you don't we're content creators are working on one specific language. And then everything is seen on the TMS site where you can efficiently manage your translation process process. But then it all comes back into a multilingual site that nobody has like to manually press the button to publish.

Bryan Montpetit 33:20
Right. And I mean, with that said, Do you think that there are I'm deviating a bit from the the questions I think we've gone through through most of them at this point. With respect to that type of flow? I mean, do you think that there's resistance in terms or difficulties even from LSPs, and clients to actually get that in place?

Igor Afanasayev 33:42
Well, technology is not always there. Right? Sometimes clients do not understand what the ideal process can be. Sometimes they are still thinking about those manual processes. This is what they asked for technology providers, and this is what they get. And everybody seems to be happy unless they feel that something is a little bit manual than what they expected. Right? So yeah, it means that we, as an industry, we need to think about this and what technology is there. It's just, I think making that mental shift towards, you know, dealing with that with this continuous localization for for, for marketing and ability to provide those tools and educate the clients that this is a new way to do that, which actually saves you lots of money. Because again, you must be factoring in the number of like steps or like button clicks or the amount of time that you are spending as a part of the organization team to consistently you know, like, maintain that. That solution.

Bryan Montpetit 34:48
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much for the answers. We're at the fun part where you get to actually pick a person or a question that is, you know, that she thought was the best and we can then award that person with The book humor seriously. So if you actually go into QA and select one of the questions, okay. We'll announce it momentarily. So And just so you know, I

Igor Afanasayev 35:15
think I think I think I will Pete, I will pick Kate, with question about an uncomfortable question, because this was an uncomfortable question to me. I did not have an answer to that. So, in the spirit of this talk, Kate, let me see. Kids are like kolu that would be the winner.

Bryan Montpetit 35:38
All right, there we go. Thank you very much for that. And I guess we're gonna go into a break. I mean, in a few moments, but Igor, thank you so much. Always, you know, a very insightful, I appreciate the line of sight on all these topics. And I'll probably be hitting you up in the near future with a couple of questions on my own. So.

Igor Afanasayev 35:58
Okay, sounds good. Thanks, everyone. Like

Unknown Speaker 36:00
Thank you