Evolving tools for language service companies and departments: Is a TMS enough?

Bryan Montpetit 00:00 Coming up next, we're going to have a presentation, which is evolving tools for language service companies and language departments is a TMS, you know, presented by Bridgette Halak. And, you know, I've been reading for the synopsis for this presentation. And the pandemic got me it got me thinking, of course. And one of the things that I really wanted to say is, you know, how you you realize and industry has reached an awesome status is when we have really cool acronyms. So what are the new ones that I've been exposed to? And it's not just was the NPMS. So either, Bridgette, how you doing? Bridget Hylak 00:34 Hey, Brian, how are you? Bryan Montpetit 00:35 I'm doing great. Thanks. I'm really looking forward to hearing what you got to say. And I read the synopsis piqued my curiosity. So please, you know, I'm going to hand it over to you. Take your time, do what you got to do, and all the top back in probably with about three minutes left or so so we can go through questions. Bridget Hylak 00:52 Thanks so much. We're gonna start on the share my screen. And thanks so much for having us from having me, Brian, appreciate it. Great. To get this screen up. All right, is everyone we're all good here. I hope everyone can see this. So first of all, I really want to thank everyone. Welcome, everyone, especially the smart cat team for inviting me they have done such an impressive job with this conference. I really think it'll be a benchmark for others to come. And I also would like to quickly send well wishes and prayers to everyone around the globe really dealing with this pandemic. And our friends in the Bay Area in LA in Oregon who are also trying to manage all the fires on top of this, please everyone stay safe. My name is Bridget Hi LAC and I am a consultant to the language and localization industries. I'm a Stanford University alum, an ATA certified translator, a court certified interpreter. And I serve as a nominated member on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania judicial systems, language monitoring and evaluation team. I've been a language business owner for over 20 years during which I have directed 1000s of teams and multilingual projects for different media over the course of my career. And my expertise is really in high level branding, connection, nuance and impact. And I'd like to start out with this picture today, because I think a picture says 1000 words. And this one hopefully illustrates a dilemma that a lot of people feel especially on the translation industry side, when they're looking into translation, localization tools, a lot of the tools look kind of the same. You don't really know which one to pick or what key is going to work with what and it basically comes down to which one of these locks is really going to be right for me, for my company and for my teams. Before we do before we review on the agenda for today, I'd really like to just start by taking a moment to as language industry veteran, I have to do this advocating for our community, I'd like to take a moment to appreciate the complexity and the beauty of this work that we do every day. Connection is really King in our industry, we cannot lose sight of that. And it's an amazing honor. And when we sit behind our computers every day in the sterile environments, poring over words and tags, and syntax, it can get a little bit, we can lose sight of the fact that when we are talking about the colors of wine, there's a whole gamut of information that we need to transmit or the skin tone of the young lady below. There. There are simple and complicated yet very subtle ways to to manage these problems. And so, again, working as creative and the creative part of the industry as I have quite a bit. Some of our goals with creative language include those subtleties, complexity, beauty, connection, and really intimacy. And when we move over to the business side, things look a little more black and white. They can be a little austere in some of the goals and business communications tend to be more like advantage and strategy, connection and protection. I've included a sampling of words down below which are a little bit difficult to translate out of context. And also these two slides hopefully illustrate why you know there there are language professionals that handle specialties these are just too creative and business but there are so many language specialties in the middle of these two and having the right professional for the job is really key. But nonetheless, across all language specialties. There's one thing that we have in common they have in common and that is if you almost missed it there. It's a little bit faint, but that was on purpose. It's connection. If something comes into our workflow, it has a lemon and it comes out as a watermelon. We have completely failed. Likewise, if we put something in the color khaki and it comes out army green, we may be in the right ballpark, but again, we haven't quite hit the mark. And you know, there's all kinds of examples the middle column it illustrates how our struggle is real that the middle columns a little bit funny, you could say some of those things are humorous. But what they really boil down to, in this case have slipped carefully. That's a lawsuit waiting to happen. The psycho clinic has just alienated all the customers that they're trying to attract. The Windows fail at the top is something you know, it's nightmares of kind of kind of situation. But even in other situations online, HubSpot, the example that provided there is a error in the headline. And then when we look over at the lush error message, you know, even though some people might not even notice that there's a misplaced apostrophe in the word can't, other people do I do and in my experience, and what what I feel when I see that is just a company that alienates me as a customer. And actually, I have a colleague I was talking to about this recently, who is a native Spanish speaker. And she said that when she sees errors like this, even small ones, it makes her feel like someone doesn't care about her. And I think that is it. In a nutshell. If we feel like someone doesn't care about us, we won't buy their products, we are not going to opt into their their registrations, we're not good, we're gonna look elsewhere, we're going to look for someone who cares. And so when we create these types of errors, or allow them to happen, we actually disconnect our clients, which is the opposite of what we need to do as translation and localization professionals. It's the opposite of the goal. So there is perfection in our industry. And I saw this, this photo on a colleague's LinkedIn profile, and it's just so perfectly illustrates perfectly illustrates the dilemma. Uber in Spanish is Uber. I mean, that's just perfect. You know, if you add to this, you will reduce the impact. If you detract from this, you may not get your message across. So there is a perfection. And that's what we all need to be striving for our agenda. Now moving on, and again, there's my language industry side. But moving on to our agenda for today, we're going to look at something called a dilemma, I'm sorry, a phenomenon called false fluency. And that's the top linguist versus the top tech tug of war that actually exists. And if you don't know that, then you may be spending a little too much time on the localization time localization side, we're also going to look at a three year research study that I was honored to be a part of, we're going to provide a graphic that I hope will be very useful to helping you unpack the how to build your stack when it comes to translation, localization, and that's called the Translate toolbox. And then finally, I'm going to be providing an upgrading and onboarding survey that could be very useful to managers and teams who are considering moving into a new product are adding to the product that they have. And I should quickly say that I know our audience is very general, we could have individual linguists all the way to corporate entities represented here. So we will have to take a wide lens on these. So I'm just going to do my best to hit a lot of points. So false fluency, what is that we could talk about that all day. But what false fluency literally is, is that we have lost the connection, just like some of the examples I showed you. False fluency creates a barrier to the message we're trying to transmit, it's when you read something, and you just go, you know, wow, this is a translation. And in order to really understand it, you have to decipher it, you have to pick it apart, you have to spend time practically translating it, and you're lucky, if a client will do that, or a potential customer will do that, because most of the time, they're going to walk away and look somewhere else that's easier. And as a linguist, I have a few opinions and how this might have happened. I think that there has been a lot of insufficient vetting of linguists on the localization industry side, especially initially, there's also some really great linguists Miss handling the tools or they think they know exactly what they're doing and some error comes in. There's some veteran linguists great colleagues of mine who are unwilling to adopt the very new some of the newest technologies. And this isn't because they're not motivated. It's because the productivity in their eyes is diminished in providing that excellent connection, that excellent translation, which we are trying to do as linguists. And I think there's some over reliance on automation. For now, anyway, you can't just flip a switch and expect to get a widget on the other end, you really have to put in your time, your due diligence. And as an illustration of this, I just thought this was very apropos the the doctor at the Medical robot there and you could you can pretend you're on the other side of this picture in need of some type of surgery. And what would you want to know in that instance, you'd want to know the medical qualifications of the practitioner, you'd want to know he was licensed to practice. You'd want to know his technical qualifications that he's licensed on that robot. And by licensed I mean he has more than a day or weekend course and how to use that robot. You also want to know about robot reliability. You know, how many how many operations like yours has this robot done? Were they successful or not? And you know what happens for example, if The powerful as the power goes out, and then training on the bridge, meaning just because we have a great linguist or a great doctor and a great tool, in this case, the robot, how much have they worked? And how much experience do they have with both putting both together because those will, will bring about some advantages and some disadvantages. And I think that this disconnect is in the language and localization industry has contributed false fluency, I believe that we can improve that. But I think that's kind of where it came from. And so, as a little plug here, for the language industry side, I really am advocating for two new certifications, and people are already working in these these positions. But I really think we need certified linguist technicians. And that would be a person who is fully fluent when it comes to both the language they're working in and the tool that they're working in. And then also certified MT editors, we have so much going on with empty post editing right now, having a certification for empty post editors is long overdue. There's a misconception that just because people can read or speak two languages that they can do empty post editing. And that's just not the case. So if anyone's interested in promoting these, also, please contact me because I actually developing rubrics for those. Moving on to our research study, so I was very honored to be part of a team of of linguists, software engineers, desktop publishers, project managers, accountants and designers. We spent three years approximately in the crock pot, we're calling it a crock pot, not a think tank, because we all liked food so much. And we tried to ask the question, you know, what are all these tools about what is what, and this was done in order to help advise and orient many of our consulting clients who are kind of confused on that whole terrain. And this study was independently funded, it was incognito, we did not advise the software companies, what we were doing, we purchased full product purchases, we had no personal interests, as I said, besides, besides learning, getting information for our clients, we took advantage of trial periods, and extended trial periods. We pored over white papers, product literature, we grilled tech support teams, and sales teams. And we really got down and dirty in the trenches with some of these products and put them through the pipeline, like real projects and created dummy projects with dummy names of clients, but we put them through the pipeline, like on a regular day. And some of the challenges we encountered. First of all, the training was a very big problem. In some cases, some of these systems require a long time, a lot of training, some are a little more intuitive and easier to use right out of the box. There's also the challenge of acquisitions, even as we would be testing a product, it might get acquired or acquire something else. So that became a little complicated to handle while we were trying to study the products. And literally so much is just changing, especially since COVID. And even now we continue to research products, and you know, a lot is changing. But the result is that we were able to come away with some very informative insights and takeaways, we concluded that most of these tools do offer unique benefits. They're all positioned from a different angle, and they usually have one or another strength. But the right tool really depends on each client's needs and their situation. And the point, as I stated before, really was to answer that fundamental question that many clients have. And that is, what exactly am I buying, there are a lot of options out there. And when you start to get into them, it can feel a little bit like that picture at the beginning with all the locks. So in the big picture, translation and localization tools mainly include our CAT tools, computer assisted translation, our empty engines, which are all basically an empty at this point, might as well say term bases and translation memories, localization automation, and that TMS. And as Brian alluded to, at the beginning, I just think that the whole TMS acronym is kind of outdated. I don't know if it's going to go anywhere. But we need so much more than a TMS in the work we do, especially when we work with other media like subtitling or voiceovers. And I do think something more like a MPMs multilingual project management system might be more apropos for what we need on the language side or combining with the with the localization side, you might even start calling it a GPMs a global brand management system. But these general categories you know, they do get a little cloudy and they need to be broken down more. So that's that's where we're going. Now. This is very hope, how helpful so we can when we advise our consulting clients prior to selecting a stack, we advise them to consider first what are your options and as I stated that what that is and seems to be a difficult question to answer. Venturing into this territory can feel a little bit like, you know, taking a trip to Costco when you you want to get a case of water and you walk into the Costco. And along the way, you see a Vitamix and a massage chair and some of those really great cookies that Costco makes. And you pick them all up and you get home and you realize, well, heck, I didn't get that case of water. And that actually has happened to at least one of our clients. And so that's important to consider what are your options and to understand what your options are and what each tool can do. And secondly, what's the least that you need to get there, at least initially, just because everything has everything doesn't mean you need it all. It also doesn't mean that you have to use it all. But considering what's the least you need to get there is a very important consideration, we always advise our clients to consider that to now our translators toolbox graphic, these are some of the main components and translation localization stacks. And I'd like to unpack this a little bit for you and for new people or business owners are linguists who may just be moving now into this arena. So we start with our CAT tool, most basic foundation of the trans lock environment, the computer assisted translation, we could pretty much argue that everyone has to have one by now even some of my literary translator colleagues who may swear otherwise, there's benefits even in that arena. Then moving to collaborative computer assisted translation, which is basically like a Google doc of the translation environment in which you can work in real time with colleagues of yours across the pond across the continent in different time zones. And, and literally accomplish work that you would never have dreamed of years ago. You know, I always say 100 years ago, when I started in this industry, I this would have been like a pipe dream when I was working with those bilingual dictionaries. But collaborative cat is a phenomenal opportunity to collaborate with your colleagues and have all of your assets updated in real time as you go. It's kind of a wonderful experience. Terminology management, of course, works hand in hand with your cat tool, and that includes your translation memories and your glossaries. And these are essential to providing quality, really beyond savings. I mean, my Hallmark will be focusing on that quality. And without this, you know, providing consistency and documents is really not possible. The TMS and again using with tongue in cheek or the multilingual project management system, that's really like the glue and the pipeline that helps us organize our projects and link projects to the, to the translators, and just start the whole process of translation editing. And moving back to post editing, QA quality assurance, is that going to be something that you need in your workforce it can be part of your workflow is it part of the product that you are looking at, is a standalone tool that you have to integrate with the product and with QA one, one thing to note is that some QA is available for certain target languages, but not all. So depending on what your target languages are, you may need to specify or look for a certain product that can handle all the target languages, then neural machine translation. Again, even though the language industry is not yet all the way on board, and there's a reason for that, um, it's a lot of empty. A lot of colleagues who won't touch MT post editing because it's just not productive, they feel they can do a whole lot better job with their own resources in their own skills. But there is a sweet spot in the middle. I think having empty in the background, when we translate and offering up suggestions is just a really wonderful and very, I think essential at this point for productivity, then the client portal, this was a really big point of interest in our research study, we could really see and feel the need for this looming, and some of the products we tested initially did not have client portals, but they do now. But despite that, while some systems did have the portals, there was a common complaint about getting clients to use them, you know, and so what's the point of having a client portal if you can't get your clients to use them, and that is sometimes because these portals offer generic or cold experiences to the clients or there were too many features are not enough. And, quite frankly, who really wants another login? So in one case, we actually had to build a custom portal for one of our clients and I began as a consultant to programmers in the business industry was able to help coordinate this project but we built this portal to integrate into this particular client's corporate platform and that provided a branded experience and enhance the intimacy with their client base and also provided the added advantage of I kept their clients data safe and independent from the portal. So that was another advantage. Then we go on to CRM, which is customer relations management or client management, CRM, in our stacks for the translation and localization industry, it can be very basic, it can be just a client email, that may be what some systems offer for how you organize your clients, only an email, or it can get extremely robust and offer things like price lists, and the contracts you may have with your clients, all the contacts, and it could even start to expand into the marketing arena. So CRM is another possible component. And I all of these are one or another, as in some some systems, and they're all separate pieces of the puzzle. So I should have mentioned that at first. Next is accounting and analytics. Again, not all systems provide this as built into the system, you may need to plug in or integrate your accounting into the system that you choose. And analytics, I separated that out on this graphic, because sometimes it is also a separately charged product. So accounting and analytics is another piece of this puzzle that you may need and may want in your translation localization environment. Next, we have vendor and team management. Again, this is not you know, it would seem counterintuitive, this is not offered inherently built into every system out there. And though we are so heavily dependent on vendors in our industry, some systems charge separately for this and you know, that is what you need, you pay for that extra function. But vendor team management is so essential because it handles credentials and clearances and background checks. If you have clients with sensitive information, you'll need to make sure that the certain vendor, for example, certain interpreter may have a background check or clearance. And this helps you organize that and finally interpreter management. I've added that even though it's slightly outside of the translation localization environment, because some business models still require it, some companies still do both. Some products only provide interpretive management and scheduling which is important to to note. But again, the interpreting industry is an industry in and of itself. So that makes perfect sense why some products are only doing that and they do it well. Now we have two highlighted areas on the chart, your private server and your branding. And there's doubt dollar signs running down the side of this for a reason. Branding, first of all, it generally comes at a premium, if you're going to have a system or even parts of this system branded, you'll, you'll be paying extra for that and a brand branding could could vary from just slapping a logo on all the way to some type of branded experience, like we were talking about earlier might require an integration. And then a private server again, that also comes at a premium, you may need it depending on the sensitivity of the information you're handling with your your handling. But it does provide enhanced and verifiable security and compliance with GDPR. Or if you're handling intellectual property, or PII, you may need it. And along that those lines, it's important to remember I mentioned a little detail about cloud compliance. This is a from AWS a statement on security and compliance. And we should bear in mind, you know, private servers that option is is there for a reason. Because companies as it says here are not cloud providers bear contractual responsibility for compliance in the cloud. Cloud based companies do a phenomenal job at what they do. But we just can't drop the ball and assume that all the responsibility is in their hands and that may require you know, a little more support in your company on the IT side. So pulling it all together here, the TransLink toolbox. Few platforms will contain all of these components. And one question to ask is do you need them all. And again, as I mentioned earlier, you may not need to use them all just because the system offers all of them. Some do offer them and many of these components natively. Some systems and products provide baseline components and others is like optional add ons that you pay extra four. And then some systems will permit additional features as integrations into their platform through API. And that could range from allowing to supporting the API. So there's a big gamut there, and you can customize certain features but that may become it's important to note that may become a privacy concern for sensitive clients because if you start mixing and matching pieces of different products, your information can be and your data can be on several servers and then could be an issue. So you have to be aware of that. So some basic advice, we want to keep it simple. If we have 100 tools, that doesn't mean we have 100 solutions, we might have 95 extra problems. On the flip side of that, if we have everything in one basket, we should always be aware of backup plans, we may need in case something, there's a lag or there's there's some downtime, the integration equation, I put her so good there, because it does really allow us a lot of beautiful customizations. But again, sometimes if it's not handled, right, can compromise data security. And then security, security, security, really the question of the day as this industry continues to move forward and dominate the globe, really get your legal team involved. Now moving on, we're almost done. And I've been talking fast. Um, that's probably something I do a little too much of, but had a lot I wanted to share with you today. But the upgrading and onboarding survey this is hopefully, hopefully this will be very useful to management and teams when you're considering upgrading what you have, or perhaps onboarding a new system. So when you are building your stack, you you should consider for your company several things. I'd like to highlight a couple because we're running a little bit short on time, I think whether you are a new company moving into translation localization for the first time, or you want to do it right this time, or you're an established company, I think that that really has a lot to bear on what we would recommend and what solution might be best for you. Budget is a really big issue that a lot of people aren't aware of when they first start looking at these tools. And as I showed you that whole chart, and again, some of these components come in one package. And then sometimes we have to mix and match packages. And that starts to mean mixing and matching licenses. But there's issues like users and renewals and training that could become part of the budget picture. As far as the components and the system. Everything on that list, you know, I can go through one by one. But as I said, I want to try to finish on time here. So one of the main things that I do like to emphasize to clients is the UI and the UX, we really recommend that clients put their that I'm sorry that our clients and translation companies and localization companies put their clients first, if the UI or the UX is outdated or old, and your clients feel that pain, you will feel that pain and your bottom line, eventually, it is something you do not want to pass on, you want to try to have as fresh and as easy of an experience as can be because it's really a big factor and a lot of people's decisions nowadays on what to do and how to go and who to work with. So moving last now to our last slide, here's an overview of a general upgrading our onboarding plan, really research your options, because there are many just like the very first picture or hire a consultant to help you with that. Survey your clients, your teams, your employees, because everyone likely is using a little something different depending on where you're coming from. And ask them what they're comfortable with what they're familiar with. Ask them to deploy some trial periods and on different products and see what they like actively engaged the trial periods, use them up every every every last minute of them. user test internally, we recommend that you set up client profiles that go back to your team. So your team can evaluate what the clients experience will be when they do actually when you really when you launch the product. And then when you're ready to launch, you know, we recommend just launch to just one client at first that you really trust in someone you know, for a while, use what you need and only what you need. If it has more, you can use it later. work out the kinks and go live. And you know, finally I we do recommend and after seeing people go through this, we recommend that you a lot a minimum of two times x two times the time to your launch date, or double the size of your onboarding and upgrading team or as a say in bad business. Take your chances. So I do want to thank you so much again, and thank you to them to the smart cat team. I again, appreciate being here. And I certainly hope this is a it's been a little bit of overview that's informative to as many of you as possible. Bryan Montpetit 29:28 Bridget, thank you so much. That was a wealth of information. I think you hit it bang on with respect to time. So thank you for that as well. And yeah, I appreciate you mentioning a lot of the items within that presentation, which unfortunately, we don't have time to go over now. But we'll be moving on to our next presenter. But again, thank you, I'm sure that everyone's going to want to reach out to you on LinkedIn. So please do share your your LinkedIn information. Please participate in the community as well. And, again, thank you, I really appreciate it.