Localization Industry Outlook 2023: Breaking Molds and Shaping Trends

Loie Favre 00:00
So again, if you have any questions, feel free to put those in the q&a, not the comments. So we'll take some time to look through those at the end of our webinar. And I believe we can get started. It's 3702 and Berlin, where I'm located. Welcome to our webinar, localization industry, Outlook 2023. Planning, breaking walls and adopting trends early. We hope today will be a really interesting conversation between my me and my co host, where we discuss some trends for the upcoming year, or the year to come rather, and some new ideas that you could perhaps use within your localization teams, or within your company in order to scale grow and find new technologies. So I like to present our co host, block legend, Yann Hensley's, he is he is the CEO and founder of beluga linguistics, so many, many years of experience in the industry. And in addition to that, I believe seven years ago, he founded lock world, which many of you probably are not locked lock lunch story, which many of you probably know, it's a worldwide community. And I know Yan will have the opportunity to tell us more about his awesome community coming up soon. So welcome, Yan. And thank you so much for taking part in our webinar today. And I'm very excited to chat with you today on all our exciting topics.

Jan Hinrichs 01:38
Thank you very much, Molly. And great, thanks a lot for having me.

Loie Favre 01:44
Thanks. And a little bit about myself. I'm lonely. I'm the Head of Content at SmartCAT. I also have been working in the translation and localization industry for numerous years, starting as a localization manager, a translator and eventually found a passion for writing about translations and localization. So very exciting also, to be part of this webinar with you today. We'd like to start our webinar by first giving an agenda of what's going to be running, what's going to be happening. So I've already shared some housekeeping with you. We have a q&a at the end. So if you have questions, feel free to pop those into the q&a section of the webinar. And we'll share it will answer those questions at the end. I will also be sharing some insights from our localization industry report and sort of setting the stage for the conversation that Yan and I will be having. After that, we'll be diving into the conversation. And first talking about emerging trends in the localization industry and what you can kind of what could potentially happen in 2023. So that will be increasing volumes, hybrid workflows, AI and other technologies and sort of topics that kind of fall into those categories. And finally, we'll be giving you some tangible tips to take away from this webinar. In order to get your team future proof and future ready. Use your localization teams so that you have sort of like the skill set the tools that you'll need to go forward in the coming year. Right. Perfect. So a few weeks ago, SmartCAT, was able to do a survey will publish the findings of a survey, which interviewed or surveyed around 145 different enterprises that covered at different countries and with a total budget localization budget of over $300 million per year. So we definitely got a lot of insights from companies who had a lot of translation and localization needs worldwide. And these enterprises definitely had lots to share with us. So one of the findings we saw is that the growing trend, the need for translations is going is growing continuously and exponentially. 45% of respondents reported that that trend their report translation contents into one to five different languages 67% of respondents plan to increase the number of languages in 2023 and ADF 80 I can't see the number there 80% say that they use quality as a metric in measuring success. So from this company, so you can really see that quality is one of the driving factors in the localization efforts. We also ask some these these companies, the 145 companies, which attribute is most important to them, when they're taking care of translations and in their translation efforts? You can see that 35% The response was child translators translation quality, followed by scalability of translator resources, and process and communication between teams, as well as contracting invoices and paying paying translators as well. So this was very interesting findings for us. One of the findings we also saw was that translation budgets, while they increase for some times at South for some time, at certain what at some point, it plateaued. However, the need for translations has continued to grow exponentially since then. So the localization teams are sort of faced with a dilemma and were a challenge as as to how they can continue to scale and grow internationally, with the budget they have in hand at hand. So they need to find new solutions and ideas in order to grow. And another great finding we found from the survey is that a lot of companies have noticed a gap in its linguistic supply chain, meaning that they have not been able to work as closely with freelancers as they might have might have wanted to directly are translators, as they wanted to refer to directly. But when having done so in the past, they experienced higher quality when they were able to connect with them directly. So 52% said that operating that talk working directly with translators allow them to have very good results. And when they weren't able to work with translators directly, they still had good results. But the seemingly the consensus was, the quality was a lot better when they're working directly with translators. So that's kind of a telltale sign of where the industry will be going next year. However, there's still a lot of challenges that localization teams are facing in the year to come. And I hope now that we can dive into the conversation with Yan, in order to discuss what some of these solutions might be, and trends that teams can be prepared for moving forward.

Jan Hinrichs 07:11
So yeah, yes, interesting. Looks like you could say, maybe, maybe LSPs are out of business as a solution, because if if working with translators, directly woods, would be, you know, the Holy Grail, which definitely, you know, it's the, the closer the committee communication is, the better and nicer it is. Now, now, if this, the conclusion is, hey, let's become in house, localization agencies, translation agencies, maybe we're, we're not, there's no room for LSPs, then you're gonna be really sad after by 14 years, or 16 years now in the industry, to say goodbye to something. And, you know, I think that to touch base on this first first point and your charts, though, it's very tempting, 10 temptation. To think that working directly with translators solves all the problems. It means what to take a decision. And we as those who have been in business, you know, we know that opportunity costs is a big thing. So when you become an inside LSP, to handle large volumes, you know, you're not doing your core business. So if you're a software company or product company, or whatever, and you build a huge, huge department have in house resources to manage directly or even translate directly, it can become a an opportunity cost, and it could can derail you from from your core business. So, hybrid models, I think this is this is where we have been talking about a lot what we have been seeing in the past, working directly with translators, and you know, we have an industry where the LSPs were, we are we have been tasked with separation between those, those who, you know, content producers, companies, and people, management companies like the lugar who we deal with the large workforce behind 30 languages, or 50 languages and if we talk about quality, how do you make sure that these 30 people or, you know, 100 people or whoever works work well motivated. So bring bring this into an insights model is hardly scalable in from my personal experience at so the companies where I've been working before, this is due to break. So we need to find, like smart solutions to work.

Loie Favre 10:25
And I know that the industry report highlights not only the fact that working directly with translators, but it's, it's working with translators and agencies together. So it's finding ways to kill collaborates work together with different as you say, with different possible structures than maybe have been explored previously. So there seems to be sort of a gap in that companies want to work with both, they want to collaborate with both. So they want to find a way to collaborate, yeah, together with agencies as well as with translator, so I definitely don't think that LSPs have a place to go, they definitely have a very central place in the industry, but just you know, the the knowledge that in itself, the technology knowledge. Also, regarding my, the technical terms, the technical, the technical side of translations, it's not something that people can instantly learn, let's say, from one day to the next, you know, you need a lots of you need to know where the translation has industry has been, and the progress that has been made. And that takes a lot of time to dive into those technologies, those resources and all the best, all the best practices that exist, and that enterprises or companies can't really learn and they could definitely, you know, work together with agencies and LSP is in order to, you know, take that knowledge and run with it and work together collaboratively.

Jan Hinrichs 11:58
I think you know, if we look on the trends, what we are seeing in the last few years is this adoption, massive adoption of TMS so, so, let's say that the buyers have got so, we move online, we move cloud in the last decades, like from 2010 to 2020, we have created this whole industry around like TMS, I mean, there were TMS before, but real adoption started in 2000, like around 2008 2009 2010 and then onwards. And, and now this is maturity, the market maturity has come from software, early adopters, so software companies that needed a way leaner approach to managing ongoing translations, continuous translations, as smart get named is very, very lean some years ago. So continuous translation has been adopters, through technology platforms like SmartCAT. And the other TMS we have in the market. I think the fear and the power these companies have in the market has made many more people like aware of it. So we're branching out out of software into like, all kinds of other companies and players who lost their fear about you know, moving to cloud based Lean approach. So this is this is for me the past this is this is more or less, I would say a maturity today. Now, in connectors, you know, connectors were a big topic in the last five years. Yeah. So how can we in this big or smaller companies, or the software tools we have in our, in the companies we serve and you know, the companies we run? How can we get this content into one single workflow was the single management transaction management. So there was this race around connectors for the last few years and I think this we have reached a pretty decent, omnipresent connectivity situation API's and so on. So let's say the technology part has reached some maturity. And now we need to go to what I feel is a current situation is human. It's human, it's people manage. So motivation, translators, communication between translators and LS PS project managers on the LSP side, on the client side, communication with stakeholders in country specialist. And adapting to these new structures, these powerful structures we are right now seeing so that it's all mainly around human communication. I think this is it's a major trends are coming from now on to put our view on, on how human relations can benefit our departments, our localization project, to become more empowered, and to be considered in the whole enterprise as a, as a revenue driving entity.

Loie Favre 15:49
Yeah, I totally agree with you, as we've seen the last after you said in the pandemic, there was this huge sort of race to be digital to be digital first. And but in the, in the midst of that race, may we forgot the human side on the way there. So we saw that there was a huge knowledge gap that existed in the various markets, where, why the software might have been there, and the connectors, they kind of forget, forgot that maybe not everybody could catch up at that, that speed that, you know, companies necessarily want it. And so I think it's good to take a second to also realize, you know, the user is at the center of it. And you need to make it also people friendly, but also in a technology that's going to, like, as you say, bring people together, and in one spot, maybe in order to like drive progress together, rather than in competition, maybe. So how LSPs and translators, as well as companies, project managers, linguist, whatever, that everybody can work together seamlessly and have the same sort of knowledge base, but in power be empowered with technology at the same level. And, you know, in that topic, you know, we're talking also sometimes what AI, you know, that sometimes a tablet, and machine translation and machine learning, that's kind of a touchy topic that, that also falls in this in this topic of technology, and how, you know, it's perceived differently by the different players in history, and how that can also empower everybody in their own way. But let's say, you know, translators, or, you know, those LSPs, or other companies who maybe aren't, aren't in touch with that, that yet, how that can also help them sort of grow at the same speed, let's say, What do you think about that?

Jan Hinrichs 17:41
Right? You know, technology is a tool. So it's tool, it's, it's nothing, nothing without the humans who are behind that. And so one of the trends we have seen, you know, in our industry for a long time, was industrialization of, of transaction industry. So, in order to grow our companies, or as an LSP, to grow our companies, we wanted to have volume, the more volume, the better, but with more volume, we separate, or we have a major problem, which is human. So if I want to scale, how can I be not depending on somebody in the in the workflow. So what happens if somebody gets out of the workflow, so we we invented the translation memory, not consistency, because one, one person could more or less control their consistency. And this doesn't work if you have 10,000 words a day, or 15, or 20, or whatever. So you need large teams. And basically, what we have created in the last decades, is an industry where the individual doesn't count much. Because technology took over. And with technology, we believed we can scale to multibillion dollar companies and we have done so. So there are a lot of those companies out there. But and now we get back to what's continuous translation, these day to day operations. You do not in like 80% of all cases in all companies we work for, you know, like mid sized companies, not the big the Googles and Microsoft's and so on, but then the normal companies that roll out like 10 languages, 15 languages have around what whatever, somewhere between 200 and maybe like 5000 employees. You know, they have normally a volume which is manageable. by a few translators per language, so in what we need, here are translators who are, you know, committed to these projects, we want motivation. So what we do not want, is even if we have translation memories, and so on, content comes in from so many sources, that the translation teams need to have a very good understanding of the product, and the company and the culture. So all these volumes, values, we can't simply work with, you know, AI, or, you know, whatever, we need to manage people. And these people are our people. So, humans and humans, we have all our craziness. Yeah. So you know, and this is, this is one of the parts where we now go, again, I think we go away from this industrialization of localization, where translators are commodities, and they feel as commodities. And, you know, this is not this is not sustainable. Now, as well, as we talked about food chain sustainability, we can't talk about, you know, mass translation farming, and treat the translator as if he was just another machine, which is key to

Loie Favre 21:26
replaceable. Yeah, no, that's definitely true. And I feel like, you know, that ties into a lot of the topics about working directly with these translators, because they are, you know, valuable knowledge, rich individuals, that can, you know, bring a lot to the table that, you know, if you weren't working with them directly, or did not include them in the in the projects, you know, you've become missing out on all that knowledge. A lot of the translators have realized, in order to, you know, work and to be successful in this industry, you need to have a specialization, you can't be a generalist. And if you are able to get super niche into your topic, you're also a thought leader in that topic. And you've, you know, you reading so much documentation every day that, you know, not collaborating with them would mean like you'd be missing out, I believe. We have a really cool Converse topic here a little comment, it's from Sonya Bell dress, who said she says, let's design a process where LSPs can manage projects and translators, but still put translators in direct contact with customers. So I believe, you know, in order for the translator, and for this, the freelance linguistic linguists to become better, they need to be involved in the projects and be empowered. And yeah, I think you you talk, you'd have a specific use case around this topic. I know you weren't wanted to bring it up about how, you know, that could possibly look, and potentially be a cool way for companies LSPs and freelancers to translators to work, you know, a new way of working?

Jan Hinrichs 23:03
Absolutely. Now, we talked about these smart, smart teams on client side, working together with the stakeholders, the outside world LSPs or directly with some translators. So you know, and here is technology coming in. And when, when we had locked from home, senior from him for bid, already presented one of the projects we have been involved with where we were, I have been designing a pro process together with Samia, who said I want I can better handle direct first level content, first level support to the translators, you know, because all these strings out of context strings, if it runs through you, you know, you will ask me and we lose time. Now, one of the other parts we as an LSP take care of is the payment stuff, you know, it's always we're only looking at the translation part. Well, the life of an LSP is not only translation, but managing freelancers on a large scale for our clients that they can just concentrate on the translation part right now. So accounting is a very interesting an important part of organizing our work. Now SmartCAT and this is something you have created together with the marketplace, because Direct Payment payment systems. So if a bit decided to you know, make use of these, these tools that today technology enables them to manage quite directly translators, but they're still like one part, which they feel like it's overhead, which is, you know, selection of people? How do we find the right people? When it comes trust in it? Am I as a client, as an employee, at a pm at an employer trustworthy enough to find the right people, good professional people who will be on on board for a long time? or would this be something an LSP can handle for us, this is what we do in this special setup, we have have created so our partisan pure human resource part we select translators for in for the infamous paste directly. They respond to all the questions out there. And then, and we make sure that the teams working are first First of all, always there and available. And if not, that, we have a substitute train, substitute, we train, we select, we, we help mitigate mitigate in case of problems. And yeah, and this is just another way of, you know, working for a client who, who has a capacity and wants to have this ownership. And I think this is something new we haven't had before, before it was a LSP, who had the TMS who had the cloud translators, and so on. Now, this reduces cost very significantly for us. But also, as we we don't have this burden, we can give it along to the client, this is still a very small project in terms of languages in terms of, of translators, and it's to be seen how scalable This is to 10 languages, 20 languages, and so on. But at least we have the opportunity and the possibility to do these, these things. And I think this is very promising.

Loie Favre 27:12
Yeah, I agree that one of the biggest pain points of companies is sourcing linguists and freelancers, to our translators and finding really the right people for the job. And also that will continue to deliver high quality translations on an ongoing basis. And, personally speaking, as I worked as a localization manager, you know, we've always had a turnover and always dealing with availability and task management. And so, you know, getting to the translation that stuff and making sure like, the translations are, you know, there and on time is, is, is one thing, but if you have to, in addition, take care of like the human resources, and them hiring and testing, you know, that could also be very cost intensive, and often you people, you know, the companies use internal staff in order to check the tests of these translators to make sure that they could be suitable for the for the job, but these in house, in house in house, individuals are not necessarily you know, don't have all the cat look at everything in terms of style, grammar, the innuendos of the different, you know, the language, so that's why somebody like an LSP, like blue got, it is really, it's great that you can take care of that, take that off the shoulders, company,

Jan Hinrichs 28:29
this is actually part of our job in this project. So to do quality control on a systematic level ongoing for management to, you know, to understand, do we, this is good, this is bad, do we do we have increases and so our system is like, you know, we, we train, we tailor the teams as a so we train, we track in terms of our QA metrics, we track them, we understand where there's problems, we can train them specifically tailor the team if it's not working out. Yeah, I think this three T's model is is something that is helpful.

Loie Favre 29:18
What are the three T's Can you repeat them?

Jan Hinrichs 29:21
train track Taylor. Oh, train Taylor.

Loie Favre 29:26
Yeah, tracking and is important, you know, in terms of reporting, reporting on quality, and then using those reports in our district assess and to improve or see improve where improvements are needed.

Jan Hinrichs 29:43
I think there's this quality, slightly put up in front of so everybody wants to have great quality, but our quality and here I'm citing Renato Minato let's see, you know, in In the sense of, can we, if we control want to control quality in a traditional way, we put it review on top it proofreader and neola, whatever. So we have a long, long tail project, this was invented as part of this industrialization of translation. Okay, so low cost, first level input, you know, which is substituted by machine translation, partly. And then we put a review on it, and then proofreader and so long stuff. So basically, what we see in our day to day is, first of all, we projects needs to be not black and white, it's always colorful. So, some depending on the asset, you have one workflow, and then you have different workflow for different assets, maybe high impact or whatever. So, to manage all these qualities is system, you need some structural approaches and LSPs. Like us, you know, this is our daily bread sauce. So and this is normally nothing, what a what an in house team should be focusing on, at least not in the day to day business, but getting an analyzing results and internal linguists that you have to like to have, you know, these internal linguist, send them out to the markets, collaborate with the markets, do some very specific localization work with his in house people who have a much higher impact and understanding of the company than any outside party. So I think this is very important to, to understand that when we move move, and this is a trend I see. So hybrid mode is cool, but it must be smart. Okay, if it's not smart, that everybody understands, where, where which position they have, and that we as, like LSPs have says, Our caster system so we, we empower people, translators and stakeholders on the on the on the client side, to enable communication flows, and to have some empowers, and also feeling the ownership, you know, of debating terminology of bringing in insights, market insights, whatever, you know, those people, our translators, our linguists have a lot of knowledge we do not source at this moment, because we put them into small boxes, source texts, target texts, that's it. And that, that is probably where machine translation comes in and says, hey, I can do as I say, right, but that is not what we need. Now I understand. Yeah,

Loie Favre 33:05
and I guess that comes into the the topic of of machine translation and quality and AI, I think there's, you know, it's finding the balance and knowing how to use, you know, use machine translation, automatic automatic translation. But as you say, like finding, making sure we have other processes in place, such as L, QA, and great communication lines, so that we can, you know, increase, scale increase and grow, but we never, you know, we don't really lose that, that human side of it. Because, you know, at the end of the day, I mean, it depends, there's different varying levels of, you know, of seeing what is quality, let's say, and what kind of quality each target audience or each group or product might need. But in the end of the day, we do need to have that human side, always reviewing the context, and making sure that it's, you know, always for the right environment, I guess you could say, and if there's, there's currently a lot of topics around legal and, you know, security's health related topics that cannot be left to run wild with machine translations. And there's lots of examples currently on multilingual magazine or translator of examples where, you know, trends this might have happened and we need to reel that in and still value sort of translators who have a niche and like in law or who have a specialization in law or in health care to still utilize their knowledge and to make sure the quality is or the security level is at its, you know, where it needs to be. So what do you what is your take on on quality and machine translation and AI and how do you think that's going to change and or in the year two, Come.

Jan Hinrichs 35:00
Yeah. So machine translation will get better. Yesterday, yes, it will increase and but we will have way more content available out there, the production of content will be very high. And there's one new line of thinking, which I think we will start seeing little by little is, you know, right now, in the last two, three years, maybe we have seen a lot of copywriting. Right. So how do we copyright we create localized content, native content for local markets? Okay, so the traditional take on that is to have a briefing about the topic. And then you know, somebody sit there and create some native content on this topic. So this is highly demanding. There are a few people who really, you know, understand how it goes well. And those companies out there who have specialized in that are just way too few to fill the gap for local for local, Nate, native content generation. So translation machine translation is I have the source text, and instead of proceeding human, I use a machine and get it in the native language for positioning, this might not be the optimum for sale or sell, this might not be a great tape. It's better than nothing, but it's not great person. Now, so how can we now create content, native content on scale? And here, I think, you know, it's natural language generation. And this is nothing new. I've been talking about that. For a while or being interested in this for a while we see GTB, three models coming up. Text generation is there. It's still nascent, so we see it grow. But I think the main challenge here is to train people, our our industry, to train these industries that translators to empower them linguists to understand how to prompt rich correctly, because natural language generation is not I want this and Pana to get this wonderful article. Yeah. But it is prompting you need to write something the machine will answer was text, you might want to modify the text and get to this now doing this on scale. I think that will be a massive opportunity for our sector. And for linguists, individual linguists, LSP specialized companies like beluga, to really focus on this creation process, and run it on stare for for a variety of companies.

Loie Favre 38:05
I think that's very interesting. I think that there's a lot of different skills that we need to always think about and acquire for the year to come. And you know, last the last few years, they've been like data, data science, machine learning, and it's always continuing and always thinking, Okay, what's going to be big in the year to come? And what kind of skill sets should I focus on my continued learning and as professionals in localization, there's always something new that we can learn and sort of tweak and, you know, get better at? So kind of looking in advance and thinking, okay, how can I be an early adopter in this? And how can I can how can I prepare for what's to come? So And finally, I think we have to soon go to the q&a, but we wanted to share some sort of tactical some, some tips for how teams can get ready and 2023 So do you have anything off the top of your mind from our conversation that you could share? Like maybe as you said, your three T's or something you want to share with the teams that are participants on how you can be future ready in 2023.

Jan Hinrichs 39:14
So, I think for 2023 The most important trend we need to understand is that we are facing a recession. So we are in a recession mode, so work downturn on economic growth. Now, what what are the effects on localization? Well, you know, all these companies who have built a large internal teams might see it haft why because management might not seem like Elon Musk, maybe you know that. They are adding any value, you know, and why do I shall I have fixed costs? If I can have For rival costs by outsourcing this stuff. So I think for internal teams, it's key to reposition. And to get a very clear understanding about what is smart work, where Tuesday at leverage on top of an external layer of translation companies or individual translators. So I think thinking about opportunities, localization, focus, money saving in terms of, you know, being a bridge connecting local local chapters, with the localization flow, installing software, smart, doing connection work, internal application, this is key for, for client side teams, for vendors, for like, companies like us. Get a hand on security. Yeah, you know, security is a very, you mentioned it before, ISO 27 001. For those who are not familiar with it is a framework for security of information. We see it popping up in most of our contracts now. So now, this is this comes from the software industry, because software pushes the information problem. Now, we as a vendor, as a supplier, we get the same contract. Like that software vendor was the same requirements of information security, but was a huge difference. We are not a closed organization. But we are open we have a hybrid model we work with freelancers we work with, you know, with people around the world with a lot of people. Now, getting them into this framework of information security is the major thing we all have to think about. And it's it's for procurement issues, real blocker for us to go now for an lastly for content, content writers and translators, you know, ask for Empower empowerment, seek empowerment, bring yourself in show that you're, you know, an active role in the organizations you work for. Try to find, you know, the right interlocutor interlocutors, or interrupt whatever people you know, and show your in country knowledge, which is not only translating a word, but when you're in upskill yourself learn about GED content generation, right? Yeah, prompting, get your mind open that there's a lot of need for linguists today. It's a high quality job we need and we need a lot of them. And we do not have enough. So as I have said, Yeah, I think the first smart lot from home I was part of, you know, this is not open. So translators, we need linguists, we need people working with languages for a long time. And now more than ever, and it's the biggest, biggest mistake we could think of just because of machine translation that this is over, it's completely the opposite. We need tons of people, highly skilled, understanding and communicative human empowered people. And I

Loie Favre 43:45
guess in the year to come, I think we draw back to the conversation, the slide at the beginning about, you know, budget staying the same, we're in a recession, however, the need for localization, and localized content continues to grow. So that's another topic and industry is about advocating for localization, and finding ways to do this. So one of those ways is to prove that localization is a profit center as opposed to a cost center. And the way to do that is to utilize data. So if you are working in a localization team, or you're a freelancer, finding ways in our important metrics and measuring those against revenue, and showing really the place that localization has and translation has in this world, or in businesses in order that actually drive sales and revenue and why it's the really valuable parts of each team. So I think that's that's very important to talk about as well, especially if there's sort of in times of disruption right now is not only being you know, upping your skill set, but also know how to vouch for yourself for your team and for your efforts. Whether you are yeah, as I said like loosely localization manager or translator like everybody can anybody can Learn how to use that data to empower themselves, I think. Yeah, perfect. Great. So I think we'll go to the q&a. Yan, we have quite a few questions in there. Let's start with a question from Vladimir sadoff. How do you deal with sudden spike in the volume, for instance, the team of writers that for an RPG game would suddenly double the volume a month before the release? Not the best thing to happen, but pretty realistic. Still, judging from my experience, what are the tactics to maintain quality?

Jan Hinrichs 45:35
Yeah, doubling the volume is, you know, it's, it's, again, it's, I think, in this case, you need to act, and you need to throw in manpower. But the ideal thing is to train, you know, to train your team to train your flexibility of the team to cope with, with these kind of, like, like changes in status. So what we do, for example, is, you know, just don't work just with one transaction. If you have even if you have just one need for one, try to do like two or three, to have a backup, you know, train the system, train, train, long time, I think this is this is important, then, then you get the quality, because people are, do understand the product. And you keep them in the loop. Yeah. And so it's good for them, it's good for you, and it's sort of stable. And then, of course, you know, close your eyes, run through the situation. And then do, you know, testing online testing, because we see only like, 10% of all the content, we translate really visible to us. But it's like 10%, maybe 20% or something like that. So go on and testing as soon as possible run linguistics has there and just like, get it fix, fix as good as you can

Loie Favre 47:10
get it. Yeah. Another question we have from Mario Chavez, in selection translators are LSP still using translation tests alone? Are there LSPs that use writing tests to give their clients visibility into the translators writing capabilities? In the target language?

Jan Hinrichs 47:28
Yeah, so testing is a horrible thing. And a completely bad thing in our industry is that we haven't come over, you know, testing the quality of translators, I think we are missing data. This is something I've seen a lot launch. And I'm advocating a large lens to think about, you know, how can we connect people to software? And how can we get a tracking data meta data into our profiles, that validates my experience through cert party instances. So SmartCAT, I work on SmartCAT. And smart can surprise me that I have been, you know, working on smartcard, for that time on that quality level, eventually, if I quality checks, you know, and this can be then presented to an LSP a different LSP. And it's not about trusting you, but it's about the system that I can have trust in the system, it's a currency. So I think this is one of the the big things we are missing out today, we need to address sooner or later, there's web three, I'm a big fan of that idea that we can draw identity, get identity to, towards our track record, connect people through API's to the system say work on have proof from different platforms, and then you know, sought out this. Can you really right? Or not, and am I capable to to see if you cheat me or not? And this is a nonsense discussion. I think we need to be smarter than that as a whole industry, and can save tons of time and money for everybody involved and to concentrate on the coercing. Yeah,

Loie Favre 49:23
that's those are some great tips. So we don't have any more questions. Let me just go through here. Just see at see. have any more questions? I guess we have one more question. It's talking about I mean, we already touched on this, but how can LSPs be preparing for events such as you know, reset? Well as for the recession, and do you think the recession will hit our industry hard? I mean, you've mentioned that, you know, the need for translations, translators and localization teams continues to grow. But, you know, do you think that there will be impacts on industry in our industry?

Jan Hinrichs 50:06
Yeah, I mean, as I said before, I think the client side will be affected or clearly seen, because we still like, like, approval from management and most of the companies the visibility of localization efforts. So, probably they will, the internal people will be on in the stress situation, external vendors, as long as they do business as usual, I think they are at risk as well. We need to invent we need to adopt new use new new models like like, you know, the smartcard opportunities, people management, whatever copy copy creation on scale, like all these things, we need to move forward. And on the translators side, you know, so you know, demand side, I think, we will see, most established languages will continue to be there, and content will go through new projects might not be taken right now. But every crisis is an opportunity. So if you have pull backs of cash in your bank accounts as a, like your, whatever big software company or whatever, now, it's a great moment to grab market share. Yeah, when other falls, you can thrive. So I think now, it's a very interesting moment, again, of crisis, where new stuff is born, where there's a lot of need, and you know, back to the roots getting, you know, we want to survive, so we do something polar. I think that is, that is now what we have to do as an industry. And that is, and it's been definitely,

Loie Favre 52:02
I guess it's all about, you know, re imagining how collaborations can happen, how you can be work, how you can work, it's not getting stuck in the, you know, in old structures, breaking the mold, as we said, in order to sort of ride the tide and adjust to what the market actually needs. And I think that's, that's been kind of a trend is, you know, change has been a trend for the last couple of years in terms of the digitalization of the industry, and it continues to be a trend. But now we'd have to look at it, you know, it has to be part of our part of our DNA, I guess, to be ready for change to be agile and not rest on our laurels. And think everything will continue as it is, you know, like knowing in your heart that translations is still very important, but how can you tackle those challenges coming forward and you know, being empowered with technology and coming together via technology, like smart CAD, or you know, any other type of TMS in order to work together and create new teams perhaps.

Jan Hinrichs 53:14
And, of course, you're not alone in this, this journey, because, you know, thanks. Thankfully, in the last few years, we saw communities really thrive. Yeah. And so here comes my head as a lock launch founder. Yeah, there's always a launch, digital or local. So this ability to connect and to understand and talk to people and to exchange, you know, this is something I just can encourage everybody, it's so useful once a month, connect to like lunch, connected peers, to listen not only to the ones you are, like familiar to, to the typical peer group of CEOs or you know, LSPs or client side, but you know, broad broaden your spectrum, go to a lounge or woman in localization or whatever. And, you know, listen what's happening and it will enrich your experience your knowledge, and will enable you to take decisions correctly.

Loie Favre 54:20
I totally agree with you. I think that you know, being in touch with as many people like, it's part of networking, and you know, you're opening your, your your eyes, broaden your horizon, to see from other perspectives, and you know, there's always an opportunity to gain valuable knowledge and any of these and you know, new opportunities always arise when you sort of open yourself to those. So it's great that you know, that look, lunch is so popular worldwide. And so, you know, from localization professionals of all walks, translators, localization managers, so it's a great way to you know, acquire knowledge and information formal setting but always enriching. So it's great that it's so it's continuing so strongly. And any last questions? I think we have to slowly wrap it up. Maybe we can have one quick question from Angeline. She said, Do you have any online translation quality testing without spending much on the proofreaders?

Jan Hinrichs 55:23
online translation quality testing, with out spending much improved for years? Not Not that I can think of so there was no I mean, quality assurance, spell checkers, and all this stuff is there, I think it's they are getting way smarter now. So we have in localization process, we also see machine translated, you know, like the hybrid version of learning machine translation, so you type and the rest of the sentence is already pulled out there. There's like Grammarly the likes. So you we can expect, you know, this technology to increase. So quality first hit, and this is again, you know, instead of tap, you hit them the nail already in the in the translation place, you know, and this is this is I think, what, what will drive down costs, and enable us to make more with less?

Loie Favre 56:35
Exactly, I think, yeah, and l QA and all these, you know, extra resources and tools tie into it as well. So, there's always there's many different tools that exist that don't necessarily require proofreaders, but they can allow you to measure quality and, you know, improve from there. Perfect. So that's our webinars slowly coming to an end, Yan. It's been such a pleasure talking to you. And finally, I mean, we've done a locked lock from home before. About two years ago, we talked about the importance of community in the liquidation world. So I'm happy we were able to connect again today. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to share the screen which has our email addresses, and our LinkedIn profile link. So you can definitely connect with Ian, myself, via those channels, if you have any more questions, and we're happy to, you know, add you to our networks. And yeah, talk to you further, if you have any more open questions. And we'll also be sending out an email to those having participated with some valuable insights from our presentation from our webinar, in addition to our Inter district report that I mentioned at the beginning, and an article about how you can vouch for localization as a profit center so thank you so much again, yen and yeah, hopefully we can have another session soon. Or I can join you at lock Line Lock lunch.

Jan Hinrichs 58:04
I hope so. Lloyd. Thanks a lot for having me and the audience for for your patience and your questions.

Loie Favre 58:11
Yeah, thanks, guys for everything. So take care.

Jan Hinrichs 58:15
Bye bye bye.