You've got your marketing and product plan. You've lined up distribution around the world. You've built your business case and know you can turn a profit. Now all you need is some translated stuff and you're ready to hit the market. Google Translate or Chat GPT is all you need, right?
Not so fast. Turns out that it takes a lot of time, resources and skill to get consistent, high-quality localization. Technology and AI can help, but it pays to have a basic understanding of the language buying landscape before you lock in your plans.
Transcription
Okay, so going global, where do you start? So today I have the singular honor of not being super high level tech, which is a real privilege nowadays. I mean, most of the time when we're talking, we're talking about tech localization, MT, and all of those lovely tools, but today we're taking a really wide angle view of things. And I'm mostly going to address you as an audience as if you were potential buyers. If I were to go pitch to a client, this is some of the feel that I would be giving. If you are not potential buyers and you are industry owners or LSP owners, you can still use and consider parts of this deck useful for your own pitches to your own clients. The agenda, we're going to go quickly through goals of language. We're going to look at some of the millions of industry challenges we have. Also the best practices for language and technology because they both have to be considered now. Then I'm going to ask you, what is the question? And I'll hopefully give you a little bit of an idea of the answer. And finally, lock is key. So starting out, and again, I am feeling very happy and privileged about this. I'm a word nerd at Heart Language Industry veteran. And so I love starting in this category because I don't know if everyone outside of our industry really realizes the complexities of the work that we do. There are so many specialties, certainly in translation. We can have medical, legal, marketing translation. And every one has certain types of goals. So if we're looking at creative goals or marketing goals, these pictures are representative of what we may have to translate. We're trying to translate beauty, flavor, intimacy, and subtlety. And those things are very, very complicated. We wonder at times why translators get paid by the word. But if you look even just at these examples and you notice the color of wine and the various colors there or the flavors of ice cream, there are similar words in both of those categories. Both categories contain the words mocha, caramel, latte. But do we translate those the same in these contexts? And the answer often is no, we do not. And it's important to have the expertise to know when to use what. Business goals of language look a little different. When we have business documents, we're mainly helping our clients with their strategy, strategies, liability issues, so that they're protecting themselves, giving them an advantage over their competitors. And also, as in the first example, helping them to create connection. That is really the bottom line, the connection between what they want to say in one language and what they hope is received in the target language. And I listed some kind of interesting out of.
