Micro, Macro, and Mega Trends. What do they mean to you?

Igor Afanasayev 00:06 And the first person who will be presenting with us today will be Renato Benny annatto. Well, he's the kind of person that requires no introduction. And this makes it really hard for me to introduce him properly myself, because we're not being an adult is a recognized thought leader in the localization industry. He is a co founder of NIMS insights, a agency that helps businesses go global. He's a co host of the global podcast. He's the author of several books, and he brings decades of experience wherever he goes. So what this means for us listeners today is that his talk is going to be both inspiring and entertaining. So I'm really looking forward into Renato stock. Reno, are you here with us today? Renato Beninatto 00:58 Okay, my topic today is related to transporting or identifying trends that we can take advantage of, in our careers and in our businesses, whether you're a translator and investor. The first time about I heard about localization, though, it was a person that called me when I lived in Brazil, I had my company in Brazil, and a guy called me from doubling asking if I did localization. I said, Of course we do. But I had no idea of what it was. And there was no Google or anything to find the definition in the dictionary. We were pioneers at that time. And we were dealing with very complex issues. What I apologize, my, my whole thing is, is messed up. I think that it has to do with this. I'm so embarrassed, I like to have good presentations. So in the beginning, we saw the creation of transaction memories, terminology, management's TMS is and what was once a profession became an industry where we have big money, billions of dollars, associations, magazines, but today I want to talk about micro, macro, and mega trends. That's the topic here. I, Tucker, I apologize. I need to set up something here. Let's do this. Let's improvise. I know what I want to talk about. I wanted to talk to you about micro trends. First, micro trends is a concept that before we go into the the big mega macro trends, which is where I want to talk to you about what is going to work in the future. The macro trends are something that was developed by a guy called Mark pan, he wrote a book in 2007. And he identified that for 1%, whatever it represented 1% of the population of the United States, or about 3 million people that have a common interest, they would represent a micro trend, and he saw micro trend as a business opportunity. When I read the book, there were a couple of he presented 75 Micro trends, and there were a few that remained with me the book was in 2007. And one of these micro trends was the vegan children and vegan children of carnivore parents, which is very funny. I'm Brazilian, I'm a carnivore, I love steak. When I read the book, my son was two years old, and I didn't make any associations. But when he was seven, in 2012 years later, he comes to the family and analysis that he doesn't want to eat meat, because he has two dogs. He loves his dogs and he doesn't want to eat meat anymore. And then I realized, Oh, I heard this before. And now I was watching this Chef's Table from Netflix fantastic show, I saw the one about France and the first guy had this three star Michelin restaurant in Paris and the arpege and he went all vegan in his menu and kept his three stars. So this was a trend and and it became a market and we all know about this and today you have plant based burgers and and fake meat that allow people who don't want to eat meat for moral purposes or principles to have a decent steak a decent burger with things that tastes like meat but are not the do not involve killing animals. Another interesting and this is a more recent micro trend is for example, something like curiosity here in the United States, is the fact that most motels in the United States are owned and managed by I, Indian families from the state of Gujarat, and where Patel is very common name. So the micro trend, which creates a lot of opportunities, including translation is this group of people that are called the Battelle motel cartel, cute little name. And the cartel cartel motel. It's a group represents a significant portion of the industry that has specific economic interests, specific products that they buy specific things that they have in mind. So if we look at the translation industry, and we want to bring this concept of micro trends, I think that we won a couple that we can talk about is, for example, Brexit, which was in the news for about four years, and then it happened all of a sudden, and it creates new business opportunities, because now there is a border, there are documents, there are legal requirements that will be changing. So this creates opportunities for people on both sides of the channel, the opportunity to work on projects that are created by this micro trend. Another micro trend that was quite interesting and is moving out of the macro trend stage in our business is the remote simultaneous interpretation, or RSI. Back in 2019, we were saying that RSI was a problem, a solution in search of a problem well, a pandemic happens. And this problem appears. And all of a sudden, this technology that people were reluctant to embrace both the translators and the clients because they prefer to rent equipment, there was a lot of things involved in this process. All of a sudden, RSI is the salvation of the industry, you can do events remotely. And those people who were prepared in that micro trend, who were early adopters, were better prepared to launch themselves and take advantage of this opportunity in the market. So identifying micro trends or transporting is is taking advantage of this little movement that can create bigger opportunities if they take off. There are many opportunities that are just fads. fads are different from micro trends. But a fad can become a trend, a trend can become a macro trend. And this is pretty much how things go. So what I want to do when I want to analyze and define opportunities for us to grow in the language services industry, I like to take this sling shot approach, which is essentially you, you look back, and then you should forward, you try to see what happened in the past. And last year, I was talking a lot about patterns. And this was my presentation in the previous work from home. And if I take the slingshot approach, social movements have an impact on what's going on in the industry, you will have things like Black Lives Matter. The yellow vests in France, and gender neutral communication. And if I look back, when was the time this gender neutral communication, these movements change the language and when the language changes, you create new translation opportunities, you need to update translation memories glossaries and and you need to create new terminology. And if I look back at what happened in back in the early 2000s, when Microsoft decided to move from formal language to informal language, because people started using cell phones and your cell phone is your best friend. You don't need to to have a formal communication with the only thing that you take to the bathroom. So Microsoft had a huge effort and all the vendors that worked for them had to retranslate content because the original English changed. And now with this gender neutral communication approach. And Black Lives Matter with the thing of changing in it words like master and slave in moving to less discriminatory language or changing, avoiding gender specific words like moving from Chairman to chairperson. This has implications in the language, in the volume in the things that you're doing. And it's an opportunity for all of us it affects all of us. So before we go into We're talking about macro and micro trends, I want to remind you of two things. First of all, we are in a transformation industry, we don't create anything. In the language industry, we work on content that was created by somebody else, we transform it, we put it in another language, we adapted for another market. But we're not creators, we are in the transformation market. And because we're in the transformation market, we often think that our business is language. But the reality is that our business is, there are two things that we really do. We we manage projects, we we shift content from one place to another, we adapt it, we change it, we publish, we do all the things that we do with content. And the other thing is that we manage complexity. This is why machine translation is not really a threat for our business, it is a tool, something that we work with, in our business regularly. So so we manage complexity, we are in the business of project management. So let's talk a little bit about the real macro trends. So the first macro trend, and these are big movements that that will affect the industry that I want to talk about is the macro trend of changing economic patterns. So what is happening in the world is that we used to use the how the same. Smaller or peripheral markets, or we used to use emerging economies to supply content for us, but now they have become the real growth market in less than one generation. These developing economies have gone from being the producers of content to becoming consumers. So if you think of it by the end of 2030, it is planned that China will become the biggest economy in the world surpassing the United States, that's 10 years from now. Right? India will have by the end of this decade will have 1.5 billion inhabitants, they will surpass China, which is already a huge population. So these represent opportunities, these represent markets, these represent new languages, there is a lot of stuff that is important to us, because they are drivers for growth in our business. The other thing is E commerce in China and India will surpass the United States and the eurozone combined, in no time right by the end of the century, by the end of the decade. So the the idea here is that if we look at what happened in the past, and we look at the future, we can plan what we're going to do another indicator of these changes in business is what John Juncker when he wrote this web globalization report cards in 2019, he told that, despite all the talk about walls and Brexit, and companies continue to grow. And he said that in 2019, the average number of languages for actually, the average number of languages in 2019 was 32 languages per website. And in his ideas that those numbers would double with, I actually let me say this correctly, I'm mixing it up. In 2019, the average number of languages for website was 32, which was the double of 10 years ago in 2000. In 2009, the average was 16. The average in 2019 was 2020. But if you look at the top 25 websites, they had 61 languages in average. So project that into the future look at Indian languages, African languages, how many other languages will be added to this standard number of languages that that companies start to sell you to sell in? So this is the big economic change that is happening and this is the first macro trend. The second macro trend that is coming up in that that is happening in our environment is the obvious stick technology trends that I mash them together and call them pervasive technologies, artificial intelligence, remote operations, hyper automation, IoT or the Internet of Things. If I bundled them all together, what really means is that technology has an important impact in our business. When I started this presentation, I was telling you about how I was a pioneer in localization. But 10 years from now, I will be completely obsolete. And this is why we have a whole team of young people taking over. So if you look at the generations, the the bite by the next in the next 10 years, most of the workforce will be in their 40s. There will be the millennials, the people who were born, the Gen Z, our children will be in their 20s. And these are people who were born in a technology environment, they are not going to look at technology, the way we look. They are developing tools and products that are global by design. This pervasive technology requires localization personally, as technology grows exponentially and infiltrates every area of business 20 years ago, we were talking about y2k, and how our clocks were going to fail and computers were going to burn back then we couldn't even imagine of iPhones, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, can you imagine how much content we have localized in the last 20 years because of this technologies that didn't exist at the beginning of the of the century. Now, slingshot, again, let's look at what is going to happen in the future based of this new technological change that is coming. And that is 5g. 5g is a pain we hear about this all the time. But it will create new platforms, new areas for us to communicate and new areas for our products to communicate with each other. And how will this affect us? It doesn't really matter. Because our industry adapts to the new technology adapts to new platforms, new technologies, new formats, new requirements. But what I know what I can tell you based on this trends, and the macro trend is that there's going to be a lot more work, there's going to be an exponential growth, as we had moving from y2k to 3g and so on. The third mark, my macro trend that I want to talk about is has to do with demographic and social change. Our populations are aging, we have an eye, there's tons of statistics like more 65 year olds in China than that whole population of the United States. By the end of in the next 1020 years, there will be more owed people in Asia than the populations of all of Europe and the United States combined. So what does this mean? This means? We talked before about technology affecting the younger generations in with the aging of the population, we have big change in health care and social services, which require translation, which require interpretation in the social services area. And you have interesting dynamics like more pharmaceuticals, medical devices, medical services, and all these things will have affect our business. And an example that I have used and we don't need to go too far. If you look at the COVID-19 vaccine effort. The first vaccine was released in 11 months, which is a record. The previous fastest vaccine was the mumps vaccine that had a period of development period of four years. Imagine how many applications for because each country needs to approve it that needs to be translated. Imagine the training materials for the nurses and the doctors who are going to apply it. Think of the logistics to transform the transport export vaccines. This demographic effect affects the industry. But anyway, let's And I talked around already about the social aspects. So let's recap a little bit here, what we we have. So I talked about three major macro trends. One is changing in the economic power. The other one is pervasive technology that is affecting how we consume content. And finally, the third is demographic and social change that affects both young generations and older generations. So if we take these things together, and if we are able to identify by Trend spotting opportunities, immediate opportunities in the market, the little trends, the micro trends that have significant impacts in the future, we are able then to plan how we're going to develop our business, grow our business and continue relevant. The key message that I want to share with you today is that as we have seen in the pandemic, our industry is basically impervious to crisis we grow. I'm going I'm looking at the numbers, we're preparing the MC 100 For the next that is coming out in the next couple of months. And for those of you who listened to me, a year ago, I was saying that I didn't know what was going to to be the impact. But I, I could predict that we were going to grow no matter what in our industry with the exception of some pockets like travel, and maybe some on site interpretation has suffered. But the majority of the businesses in our industry and the numbers that we see, coming, trickling in prove that has been growing, and has has been growing more than the industry as a whole. So I that that is my presentation. And I apologize for the technical challenges here that we have faced today. But if we have any questions, I'm more than happy to give away. The book that I chose to give you is this, one of my favorite this year, the atlas of unusual borders, and eager. If we have any questions, I'll be more than happy to hear from you. And again, I apologize. I don't have my resources failed. I tried to do a cute presentation. And I don't have a problem. My computer here to see no problem. How are we? I don't even know. Igor Afanasayev 22:48 We'll give you a little bit of time just because we started a little bit later. So no problem with that. First of all, well, it was a really nice try in setting a new level of presentation in terms of like overlays, etc. So and everybody was actually pretty cool about the technical glitches initially. So no problems with that at all. We have a couple of questions. First of all, is from John Mark, who says can take perspective on the role of propaganda and censorship in media and the role in linguistics. Take for example, YouTube censorship, or linguistic alignments, etc. Renato Beninatto 23:29 So if I understand correctly, if there is an effect of that anything that affects language affects translation, right? If in order to be censored, something needs to be written before or needs to be produced. And if it is, from abroad, there is there is a ton of opportunity. I don't understand necessarily the context of the question. But what my first reaction is, there is opportunity for translation there. If you're a censor. If you're an official in a country that deals with censorship, you need to be able to you see here in the United States, the NSA, the intelligence agencies collect billions of words and transcriptions and conversations that are happening around the world. And when they flag something for attention, it needs to be translated and a professional translator shows up they use machine translation at some point, but when things get serious, the more important they become. The more important is the involvement of human translation. So I don't know if I answered your question, but there's a little riff on that. Igor Afanasayev 24:51 Okay. I think we have time for one more question, which is from Alex Chernenko. He says, first of all, thanks, Renato for a great presentation and and handled technical challenges. Well, what trends do you see over the next three years for interpreting industry? Renato Beninatto 25:09 Well, interpreting is well over the next two years, it's, it all depends on how the vaccine deployment and how the travel industry responds. My gut feeling is that we are changing as a society. And there are many opportunities that are going to arise from the fact that we are going into a hybrid model, we're going to be live in person, we're going to be in person meeting in places and virtual at the same time. And we're going to have a combination of things where interpretation, I think that the on site interpretation concept, in the terms of conferences and events is going to change and the trend is that it's going to become more and more remote. And that has an impact in how you're charged instead of charging for travel. And for daily rates, you might be charging for hourly rates and things like that. On the other hand, on the case of onsite interpretation for healthcare and social services, mostly, that might continue to be the same as it was, but it is an area that is more circumscribed to regional markets. It's not a global trend, it will be place by place. Right. Okay. Okay. I believe we have just one Igor Afanasayev 26:37 more minute for last question. And we have one from Rafael Sousa, who, who says, Do you see any trends that could reduce the need for translations in the near future. Renato Beninatto 26:49 Any trends that could be could could reduce, reduce the need for translation, reduce the need for trust, if this is topical, there will be areas that will need less translation where an area a specific area, I can see it. And we see this is content that has a short lifespan, like news and, and social media and things like that, the demand for translation, because we don't have time machine translation is taking over, right. So there's going to be a reduction in areas where the economic activity reduces, like I said, if I go back to my presentation, where I say that we don't create, we transform, anything that changes is a result of a change that happens at the source, not as a as a result of the translation. So if there is going to be less translation is because there's going to be less content in that segment. And this is where the magic of transporting comes in. Look at what is happening in the different industry and see if that industry is disappearing, or is becoming niche and it's becoming less prevalent, there's probably going to be a reduction in our demand in demand for our services. Igor Afanasayev 28:15 Okay, sounds good. So we got more questions, but we won't be able to answer them here. But we will be transferring them to our community where you can, of course, answer those. Renato Beninatto 28:28 joining your community, it's a fantastic place to chat. And you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn and connect and I'll be happy to start a conversation there too. Igor Afanasayev 28:38 Of course, which of the 33 languages that you are three questions that you answered here life, you would pick as a as a winner for your book. Renato Beninatto 28:48 Ah, first, can I give the three of them? I'll give three copies you give one I give the other two. Igor Afanasayev 28:57 Okay, sounds good. We'll figure it out. Renato Beninatto 28:59 That way you don't put me on the spot for choosing. Igor Afanasayev 29:03 Okay. Okay. Thank you so much, you know, again, thank you so much. Our next Renato Beninatto 29:09 speaker, it's always a pleasure to be here at block from home. Igor Afanasayev 29:13 St. Peter, thank you so much.